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Multi light emitters
Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2009 7:19 pm
by frosty_ramen
I am not sure if i just missed something in my scene setup or in the multilight options. but it seems that all of my separate emitters have been combined in the multilight to a single emitter slider? is there something that i did wrong?
Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2009 7:24 pm
by mashium123
emitters are now seperated by emitting materila and not by emitting object.
10 emitting object possessing 1 emitting material = 1 ml slider.
10 emitting object possessing 10 emitting materials = 10 ml sliders.
Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2009 7:26 pm
by frosty_ramen
mashium123 thanks a lot that helps
Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2009 7:27 pm
by mashium123
you're welcome.
Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2009 7:42 pm
by Gary
So I have to create 10 different MXM emitters if I want control over separate emitters that use the same MXM? That seems crazy....
Gary
Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2009 7:56 pm
by Fernando Tella
It's easier to unify materials than meshes. I think it's a cool progress.
Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2009 7:58 pm
by Mihai
This was requested numerous times to avoid merging the emitter geometry first, then changing the emitter strength depending on how many emitters you merged, so you get one ML slider to save memory. Damned if you do, damned if you don't

Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2009 8:49 pm
by frosty_ramen
Gary,
i understand the frustration of this new setup, but its is easy enough to rightclick on an emitter material and clone it.
Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 8:34 am
by Polyxo
Mihai wrote:This was requested numerous times to avoid merging the emitter geometry first, then changing the emitter strength depending on how many emitters you merged, so you get one ML slider to save memory. Damned if you do, damned if you don't

Could we please get a toggle for this Emitter-Geometry behavior in a Service Release?
I believe this new system is less flexible.
What's more work?
- Joining 20 meshes
- Creating 20 Copies of an Mxm
Thanks, Holger
Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 9:38 am
by juan
Hi Holger,
Polyxo wrote:
What's more work?
- Joining 20 meshes
- Creating 20 Copies of an Mxm
And what if you want to make a change now and control the lights in groups instead of individually? or if you are running out of memory? As Mihai says it was requested lots of times and once you play a bit with it you see it's much more flexible. Just imagine you have a scene with 20 lights and you want to control them in two groups of 10; so you just apply one material to 10 lights and other material to the other 10. Now if you want to control them all together, you just need to apply the same material to all of them, etc. Imagine this task merging/unmerging meshes instead reapplying materials, it will be much slower and it could corrupt your geometries and UVs, and also you would need to spend a lot of time adjusting emission strengths.
Thanks,
Juan
Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 9:47 am
by jc4d
For me this new way is perfect because is not destructive, if you create instances of light geometry you had to convert to polys and join those in order to merge all those lights into one multilight slider, but now we can keep the geometry intact.
Just my two cents.
Cheers
JC
Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 9:55 am
by Maximus3D
I have to agree that this new system is easier to work with, you just need to give it a fair chance to get used to working with it. We were all used to the old system so you're not alone in feeling weird at first when things we're so used to changes into something else.
/ Max
Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 10:37 am
by Polyxo
Hi Juan, Max, jc4d,
would it actually cause much work to add such a toggle?
I believe the situation is different for users of CAD-programs. Mesh modelers are not keen on merging separate meshes together as this
is their working geometry. In a Nurbs packages emitter-meshes are deliberately made for lighting only - they are in no way combined with
other geometry. Nurbs modelers also don't have to care about things like losing parametric properties of primitives when turning them to
polygons in order to combine them. They are not parametric anyway...
juan wrote:And what if you want to make a change now and control the lights in groups instead of individually?
Super easy. In Rhino I can join and unjoin meshes which don't touch in a single click action.
Split disjoined meshes or Explode gives back the exact input geometry without having to do a tedious face selection per element,
UV's stay unaltered through this operation.
This new system only has disadvantages on my side. I can understand that this change makes sense inside SubD-modelers.
Inside Rhino however it is really way faster and less clutter to do it the old way.
juan wrote:or if you are running out of memory?
That is indeed another problem. However - couldn't we get an error before the render starts?
Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 10:45 am
by jc4d
Hei Polyxo, that´s a good idea toggle if you want the old way or the new one via plugin and studio, but I don´t know if that is possible.
Cheers
JC
Re: Multi light emitters
Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 11:01 am
by Fernando Tella
How does emitter strenghs behave now? Does it distribute over all the meshes it is applyed to or every mesh gets the strengh specified in the mxm?