VfSU "Light Management Console" - Workaround

[Jackson_cg]

This has been requested before, but I thought I'd post a tip here that, provided you are meticulous with your use of omni and rectangular lights within components (i.e. consistent component naming, making unique instances as required, heirarchies, etc) SU actually has an in-built "light management" console in the form of the "Outliner" window. This can be used as an extremely basic form of those found in 3DMax, Rhino, Vue, etc.

For anyone unfamiliar with "Outliner" you activate it via the "Window" menu and it lists all the groups and components heirarchically in your file. As I never use Outliner I only discovered recently that it allows you to select and edit component attributes via a right-click context menu from within the Outliner window.

So, if you have 3 distinct sets of spotlight components in your ceiling, each set with it's own brightness, hue, etc, you can simply rename the omni components as "Omni Spot Ceiling 1", "Omni Spot Ceiling 2", "Omni Spot Ceiling 3" and without any in-model navigation at all, you can edit the 3 sets of omnis by right-clicking on their component name in Outliner and selecting VRay for SketchUp>Edit Light from the context menu. No more fumbling around in walls, ceilings and luminaire components to access hard-to-find V-Ray lights!

[thomthom]

Re: VfSU "Light Management Console" - Workaround

And the Outliner also features a Filter textbox so you can give keywords for each type of light and quickly locate the lights by using the filter.

Good tip Jackson.,

[Jackson_cg]

Re: VfSU "Light Management Console" - Workaround

I wondered about that Thom; if SU can already filter out comps and groups by name, I guess it's possible to create a extremely basic list UI in ruby which would only display V-Ray lights without embedding them in any heirarchy? This would obviously be even more useful as you would simply have an editable list of V-Ray lights, hopefully without the performance hit that "Outliner" can cause in large models.

[thomthom]

Re: VfSU "Light Management Console" - Workaround

There's a snag - you can't bring up the context menu for entities inside SU plugin's webdialog.

[thomthom]

Re: VfSU "Light Management Console" - Workaround

Saying that... I've been snooping around the V-Ray rubys. If I remember right, it could be possible to make the same call to bring up the light dialogue...
hmmm...

[thomthom]

Re: VfSU "Light Management Console" - Workaround

Aaah..hahaa! It works!


Ok - now I got another plugin project on my hands.

[Jackson_cg]

Re: VfSU "Light Management Console" - Workaround

Sweeeeet. ;D

[thomthom]

Re: VfSU "Light Management Console" - Workaround

You know - I tried to make a manager some time ago. That would let you bulk edit lights. But that required me to reverse engineer the light data V-Ray stores in SU. I was thinking of a list where you could just type values directly into the list.
When that proved to time consuming and unreliable I set it aside. Didn't occur to me to try a more simpler approach.