[jvanmetre]

I would think that emixer data could be loaded once and that it could carry through for the entire rendering of frames.

I think my approach to using emixer data is wrong at this point.

jvm

[Bubbaloo]

I see what you are saying, but I don't think it is possible. Multilight "animation" right now is for animating your individual light intensities from individual mxi's. What you are suggesting should definately be added to the wishlist.

[sebbo]

Maybe its accessible via shell commands

i've got the problem before and did not find any command flag in 1.6
my solution was adjusting the light on "key frames" with multilight. Then
i took the values back to maya and animated the light power values after it.

and guess what - it rendered even faster

[jvanmetre]

I'm using Rhino to do my animation...my solution so far has been to adjust the lights and test, test, test via render...then I render the frames having turned off multlights...I think it's faster with multilight turned off anyway. So far, pleased with results.

It would be helpful to have multilight functionality with animation.

jvm

[Cadhorn]

Wow. I kind of forgot how cool multilight is. I also forgot how crude the animation controls are.
For instance: I have 18 light-emitting meshes plus 1 Environment slider. The 18 meshes are R/G/B for six separate groups of light. I was able to label the meshes in Rhino before rendering the multilight file but... they're in semi-random order in the Multilight tab window... thankfully, they are grouped next to each other but some are in the order B/G/R, some are G/B/R, and I think one came out R/G/B.

Oh! And how do I find the time to write such observations on a day when I'm working against a killer deadline? Well, I have just setup the first 150 frames of the animation (out of 900), and told Maxwell to write the image sequence... it got to 150 in not too long... and then kept marching! It's dutifully writing out another 750 frames of the same exact image to reach 900! hee hee!

I suppose while I wait I can head over to the Wishlist section and see if this is already covered. I'll bet it has.