Multiple Vray Suns in one maya scene

[emartin8907]

Would be really useful to be able to have multiple vray suns in one scene.

Obviously you would get problems rendering with them all on at once, but this would be helpful for a scene when you have say 20 different 'shots' to do and they each require a different sun position and attributes.

Currently only workaround is to keyframe them and then remember which frame is which shot etc. Very clunky and much room for user error and also problematic if your shots are animations or have animated motion blur (which ours do)

My co worker is making a separate scene for each shot, but this is a massive project and any geometry or shader changes could really mess things up with so many maya scenes. I really strongly prefer to work in one Maya document that contains the different shots within it. Also is nice to submit renders for all shots at once etc.

Seems like it should be simple enough to make multiple suns?

[Morbid Angel]

Are you rendering all 20 shots from one master file? If you use render layers, you can layer override sun's position and other values per render layer. This should place the sun per each render layer in where ever you need.

[emartin8907]

NICE well you cannot create layer overrides on channel box attributes which is what I use to move it around, but flipping through the attribute editor I finally see the 'layer override-able' translate options for the sun Geo itself.

thank you sir!

[Morbid Angel]

yeah you have to do it in attribute editor. You can also script it. Just a simple editRenderLayerAdjustement command on any given attribute, then input the values. What I usually do is setup 1 render layer how I like it with all overrides, then copy that layer number of times and just variate whatever it is I have to do differently.