VRayLights in ForestPro object?

[Morne]

Hi all

I have a light fitting with a VRayLight inside and grouped. Can I use this group inside a ForestPro object and still have access to the VRayLight via the VRayLightLister?
It needs to be instanced couple hundred times

[joconnell]

I think it'd break it, forest doesn't behave nicely with groups either. You could do something like use forest to place the light group geo, then use forest tools to export the geo to normal instances, then one of the various object swapping scripts to replace the instances with your lights. When you export forest objects, it keeps it's settings as is but just disables the object to prevent it calculating, once you've swapped the forest instances for your lights, just tick off disable object in the display section of forest and you're set.

Definitely pity it or rail clone don't use lights, it'd be handy. To the wish list with that!

[squintnic]

i would love if either product could deal with lights - especially if you could control multiplier variance

[Paul Roberts]

Hi everyone,

Unfortunately instancing lights with either plugin is a little problematic due to limitations in Max which handles lights as non-geometric entities that cannot be generated by a geometric plugin. In the past we tried some tricks to implement it, but we're not yet satisfied with the results, though it's still on the wish list.

Alternatively, as John mentioned, it's possible to convert RC and FP to instances and then use the Clone and Align tool (or similar) to place lights, or it could also be possible to use a VRayLight material applied to scattered geometry instead of using lights. Michal has written a post about both these approaches here: http://forum.itoosoft.com/index.php?topic=3902.0

Forest also has a maxscript interface that might be helpful. Here's a simple example script that can be used to instance lights to match the position, rotation and scale of items scattered with FP without needing to convert it to instances.

I've uploaded this to our forum in case it's helpful for anyone. You can find it here: http://forum.itoosoft.com/index.php?...15208#msg15208

Cheers!

Paul

[joconnell]

Cheers for that Paul!

[AlexP]

Wish I had found this yesterday......................

Awesome though thanks.

[squintnic]

same!
nice one paul will check that out