I’m just quickly throwing this out to see if anyone else things it makes sense. Will make a proper write up in the right place, as Tom will tell me in five minutes
I find it very cumbersome and super-not-flexible the way lightmix and the lightselect render elements are setup. I work in a scene where I have many setups for different camera angles of products, all with unique lights. But there pretty much always a Key, Fill, Rim etc. Why not let us tag light sources on the Corona Light for example and then just make a LightSelect to include lights tagged that way automatically. I guess I could filter on the name and at the start of each render just make sure to update the Key lightSelect element with All the lights with “key” in the name. But that seems like a bit of a crazy way that will just make things collapse.
Next idea: Layers in relation to render elements is also something that I think about a lot. I think it would be great for mask layers to be able to get everything from a layer instead of object id, material id etc. People usually organise things that belong together into logical layers.
And ty in advance for the proper write up! Nothing wrong with a good discussion first so that folks can have their say and help shape what the final request will be.
From what you say, isn’t Layering and/or grouping enough for getting the setup you want?
Lightmix can be auto-setup using Groups, Layers, Instances or Individual lights. What is the exact case that these modes do not suffice?
I’m not very experienced with light select, so I didn’t even know about those. I just thought you had to manually add each light.
My use case is product rendering and I got classic camera angles like top, front, left, 45. And for each of those there is a corresponding layer with the relevant light setup that pulze scene manager turns on/off. Usually there’s a key, fill and rim light (but not always) and if they could automatically show up as separate elements that would be cool. So I was imagining a text field on corona light objects where you can input a ”tag” and then on the light select render element, one would also have text input for comma separated tags.
When working with remote triggered studio flashes one also groups them as A, B, C etc depending on what you need. But I think it would make no sense and feel restrictive for the average 3d artist to limit them to letters
