Light mix, more than one LightMix element

[Monkeybrother]

I just yesterday had the chance to try out the LightMix feature in a real project and I think it's going to be a big part of my workflow.
I have one thought (and this might have been discussed on this forum before, if so, sorry about that); wouldn't it be logical and/or nice to be able to have several LightMix elements and each one contained a different set of settings? That way you could have an element with daylight and one with night, etc? I know you can do this manually by saving/loading settings, but we almost always render on our farm and only get the finished images saved out, no chance to edit anything manually once it's rendered. Or maybe I'm missing something, maybe this is already how it works?

[Tanakov]

I like your forum name.

Well its not possible at this moment to create several LM, we asked for that already but as I remember it will require some standalone program.

About that have you tryed merging those in PS? I know its not that convinient, yet creating a macro in PS takes as much as 5min, and can create similar or same results.

[Monkeybrother]

Hi. Yes, I noticed a thread in "feature requests" after I had posted. I haven't composited anything in PS this project, but since Corona is all about ease of use I thought this would be a good thing to have inside the VFB.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like something like this would be relatively easy to incorporate compared to a lot of other stuff in Corona?

[zdragas]

What I do is I export all the layers as EXR, and then I combine them in AE, that way I can choose which lights (or light combinations) to keep in finals. Here is a sample animation where I use 15 Lightmix layers in AE to change the order of light switching after everything is rendered. First half shows the final render output from max, and second half is play from AE. Please disregard all the noise since this is just a test preview from work in progress.

[ihabkal]

What I do is I export all the layers as EXR, and then I combine them in AE, that way I can choose which lights (or light combinations) to keep in finals. Here is a sample animation where I use 15 Lightmix layers in AE to change the order of light switching after everything is rendered. First half shows the final render output from max, and second half is play from AE. Please disregard all the noise since this is just a test preview from work in progress.

cools thanks for sharing, I was planning to do the same method for architectural animations :)

[alias_marks]

This is pretty nifty, very cool.  The base black layer you have in the second half before you turn on any lights.  How are you saving that out?

[zdragas]

It's another light (with it's own LightSelect pass) leaking from outside underneath the blinds. You can always use HDRI in your scene for that. When you arrange all the lights in your scene to LightSelect elements, HDRI will be only light left in the LightMix elemnet.

[alias_marks]

Has anyone heard if there are plans to implement the ability to use multiple lightmix elements with blends of different combos of lights?

My coworker had a good idea to use cxr then just save out  whatever blends you want after saving to the farm.  However I'm not sure that will work with animation.

Thanks for any updates!

[maru]

...use multiple lightmix elements with blends of different combos of lights...
...save out  whatever blends you want after saving to the farm...

Can you explain what exactly you mean by those "blends"?

[alias_marks]

Thanks for the reply. 

I should have been more clear with my language :)  By blends I mean I'd like one pass to have lights A and B on 100%, with the rest off.  Then blend 2 could be lights B and C 100%.  And so on..  So lightmix #1 could be one blend, and lightmix#2 could be a second blend.

[TomG]

For animations, I believe you can save .conf files with your LightMix setups (one for each "blend" - and of course you could save different .conf files for the tone mapping and other post processing too) and then use the batch scripting mode for the Corona Image Editor to apply those saved setups to sequences of .CXR files, if that helps. You can't animate between the .conf files, you'd have to do that in a video editor.

[alias_marks]

Ah, excellent, thanks for the reply.  Have not spent much time with the .conf files.   Good idea.  Thanks for the heads up!

Cheers,

[octavtirziu]

Hi, I don't know if this has been implemented since. But sure it would be much easier to have a tonemap/lightmix element. Of course there are workarounds like saving .confs and .exr's but why not have an easy version right inside the vfb. This would be very useful especially for animations.

[TomG]

Multiple LightMix elements were added as a feature in Corona 12.