Suggestions for managing different lighting per shot?

[cgrant3d]

[EDIT - oops. this should have gone under off topic not vray general. Please move]

Often times we need to change lighting per shot - ie rotate the sun or add some additional lighting in one shot and not another. We just picked up RPManager and are hoping to use it to help us manage our increasingly complex shots / projects. Does anyone have any tips on how you tackle this (either with or without RPManager)?

What I've done in the past is to turn on/off sets of lights but that's really error prone. I imagine I could also just duplicate all my lights / sun and put each copy on a different layer then toggle that layer on/off but unless its tied to RPManager that seems really error prone too...

Thanks,

[percydaman]

rpmanager allows you to set the attributes of lights on a per pass basis. you could also do the lights on layers thing, which I sometimes do, and tell rpmanager to use specific layers per pass.

[simmsimaging]

an automatic 'pass per light' setup (like you find in LPM) would be a handy addition to RPM. At current I do it manually, haven't really got me head around the layer command thing just yet.

b

[jacksc02]

if you dont have RPManager you can just set up different scene states and reload them when you need them or use the batch process feature to send them all off to render.

[dellis]

Have you looked at this:

http://www.evvisual.com/maxscript/script_multilight.htm

i have it and it works great!

[simmsimaging]

Have you looked at this:

http://www.evvisual.com/maxscript/script_multilight.htm

i have it and it works great!

I thought about looking into this one too, but I'm not sure how it can integrate with RPM for other passes. It's kind of an either/or thing isn't it?

The problem for me is that I need the advantages of both quite often so end up rendering a million passes and making my life hell in compositing

[judderman]

jacksc02, never knew about scene states - brilliant! And the batch render dialog - why haven't I looked at this before?!

The only thing - it's fine if you're not loading irradiance maps - If I'm doing an animation, I'm rendering out irradiance maps and need to load these at render time. I wonder is there any manager you can get that has the same options at the default max one, except it lets you load up the imaps per camera.

[flino2004]

Have you tried "save scene state"?

[jacksc02]

yeah you can save a scene state for rendering GI and then you can save another scene state for rendering your RGB pass

[dejaVu]

Why not combine RPM with Scene States? RPM can load in Scene State per pass.

[Kyle_Grace]

Master Scenes

It may be a simple idea, and it it's not always appropriate (depending on the type of work you are undertaking) but we just separate the model from the lights and cameras.

A MASTER scene just has the lights and single camera for that Image/anim path and x-ref's the model into it (using x-ref scene). That way you just load up the master scene and hit render, all your settings etc should be ready to go, and the there is only ever one model for multiple images/anim paths (so that is always correct).

This also has the advantage of allowing multiple people to work on the job easily.