PDG Light Control

[chadstevens]

Hi all.

I've been playing around with PDG and I'm just wondering if anyone has ideas on how to disable and enable certain lights in a TOPS network.
I've been trying to get this to work but with not much luck.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to use the lights in a light switcher node (like in Solaris), but I'm looking for a solution in SOPS/TOPS

An example for such a setup would be I have a product shot that requires 3 different cameras and for each camera 3 different light setups.

I can automate the camera with the switcher index in TOPS, but I can't find a way to do it with the Vray Light node, I've tried scripting an if statement in the enable checkbox, but I couldn't get it to work at all.

Cheers.

[morganmcd]

Curious what you ended up doing for this. I'm doing something kind of similar where I need light colors to change based on attributes I'm reading in from TSV spreadsheet to TOPs. I ended up just using a small texture map of the colors I want and loading in the right ones for the work items. Super hacky, I'm sure there is a better way.

[glacierise]

You could instance the lights to points, and control them with attributes?

[david.anastacio]

You could instance the lights to points, and control them with attributes?

Just reported an issue to the Chaos team this weak about this. Both in V-Ray 4 and 5, using attributes in the points of the instances is not working anymore.
Tested using a userFloat to fetch attributes or using the random outputs of the sampler node and loading it via the texture slot.

Best,
David.

[bdancer]

V-Ray lights do not have user attributes thus TexUserSmth textures are not working with light.
Light instancing supports "Cd" and "intensity" attributes only for now.

[david.anastacio]

V-Ray lights do not have user attributes thus TexUserSmth textures are not working with light.
Light instancing supports "Cd" and "intensity" attributes only for now.

But light instances used to be able to read attributes, we used it in a project (V-Ray 4.3, somewhere last year).
Please bring back the support to read attributes, this is an important feature that is then missing.
I also had mixed results using the sampler node, Gosho has a test scene for it.

Best,
David.

[bdancer]

> But light instances used to be able to read attributes

Arbitrary attributes were never supported. Only "Cd" and "intensity" were supported.

[david.anastacio]

> But light instances used to be able to read attributes

Arbitrary attributes were never supported. Only "Cd" and "intensity" were supported.

Getting old and my memory betrays me, that's the only answer

Cd and intensity are working, but need to be forced via object properties in the instance node.

Thanks.

[david.anastacio]

bdancer, by the way, it looks like that in VFH 5, the render is ignoring the instanced object transforms. See the rotation of the lights in the viewport compared to the render.



It should reflect the result of the instance node to avoid confusion, this behaved correctly in 4.3 (at least in older builds).

Best,
David.

[david.anastacio]

> But light instances used to be able to read attributes

Arbitrary attributes were never supported. Only "Cd" and "intensity" were supported.

Finally found why and the how of why I thought lights supported any attributes.

It was mesh lights, they support custom attributres and those attributres loaded via shading and connected to the mesh light texture slot.

The flippers in this example are a mesh light with an userFloat driving a multiIdtexture.



Best,
David.

[tobiasroesli]

Hi david.anastacio ,

I was wondering if you could explain how to unlock the Texture slot in the VrayMeshLight?

It seams that it is by default locked.

[tsvetomira.girginova]

Dear tobiasroesli, hello.

Could you confirm a small detail -
are you on GPU mode? I have just tested it and it is greyed out because it is not supported, see here & here.
Please confirm is that your case.
If you switch to CPU, you will be able to add and use a texture.

Waiting for your answer.

Best regards,
TS

[hsz]

Can this be added to the GPU as well, please?