Link room lights together so can flip on / off together?
pctech4ny
Posts: 184
Now I'm SURE I came across this in one of the lighting tutorials I've watched, but I cannot for the life of me remember which one.
I've set up a room using the Tesla Hotel Room that has a row of track lights around the edge of the ceiling.
I'd like to be able to somehow "link" the lights together so that I can turn on or off the illumination for the whole row at once instead of having to do each one individually.
Any pointers to what I should be attempting to do for this?
Thank you.
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You can multi-select and either apply a preset or multi-select both objects and surfaces and adjust all at once in the Surfaces pane, depending on how the set works.
I don't know if those lights have a seperate "light" element, or if the entire glass fixture takes the emissive shader, but you can put those objects specifically in a Group and then hide/show the group all at once. If there's an emissive light element, that's all you need. If the glass is emissive create a version that is "lit" - Group those. Create a version that is "unlit" - Group those. Turn on or off the groups you need. Not quite a toggle, but...
TD
I put point lights inside the fixture objects. I didn't see that the fixture objects emitted any light by themselves.
The goal is to be able to flip the light emitter to OFF or ON for all 8 of them at once.
What I think I'd like to do is CREATE my own light preset? I'm not having much luck searching for how to do that.
Or is it possible to GROUP the lights together, or does that only work for objects and positioning?
EDIT: digs out full User Guide. Section 7.7 "Saving a Light(s) Preset." Going to see if I can figure that out.
I seem to be having a bit of difficulty getting the point lights to stop emitting light.
Is it supposed to be just a matter of turning "Photometric Mode" to OFF? Tried just one of the lights as a test and it still is emitting light.
Trying again with both Photometric Mode OFF and "Illumination" OFF.
EDIT: tried setting Render Emitter OFF but no dice,
However selecting and HIDING them seems to work. Now to figure out how to make all 8 of them into a group.
As long as the Emissive surface is set to anything other than full black, it will continue to emit light. Black is the only setting that will kill the light.
In technical terms, there's an interesting thing you could do here, but it depends on how creative you want to get, your technical knowledge, and the geometry/materials of the model. I'll do a quick rundown, and if you want, I can walk you through the steps.
Let's say you have 10 lights with either a single shared material or 10 different ones. On top of that, the model has a light switch with a fader. It's possible to set up an ERC controller which moves the fader up/down and brightens the lights from 0 - 100% (I did something similar in Everyday Appliances with a microwave door which closes and switches on the light)
Basically, all you're doing is linking the materials to a part of the model and controlling them via ERC. Not terribly difficult, but it may be overkill in this case.
Well this is my first attempt at an indoor environment with a lot of lighting possibilities.
I've got spotlights outside the 2 windows to simulate sunlight, a ceiling light in the center of the room, a ceiling light over the entrance door, and the 8 track lights.
Have a group for the outside spotlights and a group for the track lights. I'll have to increase the lumens of the track lights a lot (I had to make the ceiling spotlights 200k lumens each, and adjust the ray length to zero and the spread angle to 120 degrees to get decent results) but otherwise this is coming along pretty good.
Hiding the various lights seems to be working great. The ceiling light fixtures still glow slightly with the lights hidden, but they don't project any light past the fixtures themselves.
But thanks for the tips, as I'm sure I'll be moving on to more advanced stuff later on.
Exhibiting my ignorance here, but Qu'est-ce que ERC other than yet another TLA?
https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207531153-What-is-ERC-and-how-does-it-work-
It stands for Enhanced Remote Control.
Photometric Mode is essentially an "Iray switch", it enables the Iray-only light parameters. It should automatically turn on when you switch from 3Delight to Iray render mode.
Illumination is actually the right one. Not sure what's supposed to happen if you turn them both off.
This one makes the light object itself invisible in the render, but it still puts out light.
Thanks for the clarifications on what these settings do!
Thank you. I've saved of that page for later study.
One common use of ERC is to allow a single controller (slider) to trigger one or more properties at the same time (or with built-in delays to stagger an effect).
Simple example - You could link a microwave door and turntable to an ERC slider. When the slider is moved, the door closes and the turntable starts to rotate. It's much easier than doing 2 movements with 2 different body parts (especially for animators). And there's no limit to how many body parts/sliders you can link.
In the instance I posted earlier, the principle is the same, but instead of linking translations or morphs, it does it with materials.
(Btw, as far as I know, doing it with materials is only possible in DAZ Studio, and it's a fairly recent innovation, so you probably won't find it mentioned in older tutes.)