Render Hidden Lights OFF - Option to Bypass Hidden by Category

[mitchgates]

It would be great to have an option for when you have render hidden lights OFF that it will ignore/bypass them being hidden in the display category level in Max. That way you can toggle the drawing of any lights in you viewports but still have V-Ray only render the ones that are unhidden at the node/layer level. For me using lights category-level hide is always about reducing viewport clutter and never about wanting to disable the effect of the lights.

[^Lele^]

indeed, the .ishidden property stays false when hiding by category.

As a temporary workaround, add the two attached scripts to the pre and post render slots, and you're set.
Just so you know what they do without running them:
the Pre-Render one:

(
    global wereLightsHidden = hideByCategory.lights --store the state in a global variable
    hideByCategory.lights = false --turn hide by category off for lights
)

The Post-Render one:

(
    if wereLightsHidden != undefined do --verify the global variable still exists
    (
        hideByCategory.lights = wereLightsHidden     --set the category hiding to what it was before rendering
    )
)

They should not error, regardless of mistreatment. At most, they won't do the re-hiding post render.