[mocpop]

As we all know: large files with many lights render much slower if Multilight is turned on.
I'ld like to know if it is possible to unite / group several lights to reduce the amount of channels in Multilight and re- speed up the rendering?
My Maya-scene contains around 27 Maya Spotlights - I don't need to control everybody himself. Is there a solution for this?

[RobMitchell]

I believe the number of sliders are determined by the individual light materials in the scene. So if you apply the same light material to all of the geometry, it should just come up as one slider in the MXI.

Example:
Lights 1, 2, 3 and 4 have been set to a material called 70W Emitter.
Lights 5, 6 and 7 have been set to a material called 90W Emitter.

In multilight you would then get 2 sliders, one named 70W Emitter and one named 90W Emitter. It's been a while since I've used multilight but I think that's the case.

[mocpop]

No, this doesn't work because Maya don't create materials for its own lights :-/

[mocpop]

Ok, I got it
The solution is to export the Maya scene via Pack'n'Go and to cross over to Studio where you can exchange the Spotlight-Material.

Thank you for your help Rob!

[RobMitchell]

No problem. Glad you got it fixed.

[Mihai]

It seems you CAN apply a Maxwell emitter material to spotlights in Maya. There is no need to export and change them in Studio. From the Maya plugin docs:

http://support.nextlimit.com/display/mx ... a+-+Lights

It is possible to specify a custom material to be used on the emitter through the Material control. In this case, the intensity settings are ignored, and the specified material is used as-is.

[mocpop]

Oh my god, this is exactly what I'm looking for Mihai!!
Excellent!! Thank you Mihai!

[polynurb]

i still find the idea pretty good though, and have considered it myself in a situation like this:

many different light sources, let's say if more than 9 @4k-5k, merging and file transfer gets less reliable and slow with many nodes.

when working on a project, continuously refining the light settings, some things i become sure about i would like to "flatten" to a background layer and only choose a final set of lights to be accessible in multilight.

That would also allow to render scenes with A LOT of emitter materials together with ML.

[Mihai]

Just wondering mocpop, but you didn't know about the docs site? I'm honestly asking, to see how come you didn't know about it.