Vray light objects considered as "geometry" by Maya

[freedomfries]

Using Maya 2012 and Vray 2.0, NOT the latest patch... Don't know if this was adressed yet, but I wanted to report it just in case.

In a scene with VRay sphere lights, ies lights, rectangle lights... if you want to isolate geometry by selecting Edit->Select All By Type->Geometry, you should notice that Maya will also select the VRay light nodes along with all geometry... If you try to do the same procedure, Edit->Select All By Type->Lights, no VRay lights are selected. However regular Maya light nodes are. It seems Vray lights are considered to be geometry. I know that some have in scene visibility attributes, but still, for the sake of scene control, it would be nice to make the lights register as lights in the "select all" menu.



Thanks.

[vlado]

Maya does not allow the creation of custom light nodes, so the V-Ray lights are indeed geometry from the point of view in Maya. Autodesk are aware of the issue, but so far have not done anything to address it - perhaps you can help push them a bit more

Best regards,
Vlado

[freedomfries]

Oy... Autodesk sitting on its big.... laurels again. I'm not surprised that the Maya API is responsible. I'll go light a fire in another forum
In the meantime, would it be possible to add some identifier so that all vray lights in a scene can be selected from a menu item? Architects working with scenes that have a hundred lights might appreciate that.

[t.petrov]

Hi,

It looks like there is no API, which can be used to implement this feature
But you can make a mel script to do so.

With this mel command, you can get the list of all rect and sphere lights in the scene.

ls -type "VRayLightRectShape" -type "VRayLightSphereShape"

Then you can use the values from the list to show or hide the lights.

/Teodor