The Lighting Problem with Ready to use sets

vijayasimhabr

I have been picking up some ready to use studio photography sets. They are very well done and I like it. However, they are giving a studio, so there are lights everywhere.

The problem is, each extra light adds to the overall light of the room, which is extra rendering time. Further, if I want a total dark room, I cannot get it. So, after each new purchase, I am spending hours on hours, finding all the light elements and then turning them off. This one time, this guy had put light inside the ceiling, and took me a while until I realized that.

Further, sometimes I never find out where the light is, so I am stuck with that room becoming unusuable until I accidentally discover where the light is coming from. Even more annoying, light only shows up in Iray mode (and not even in PBR or Texture mode), so the entire process is a chore :(

So, is there a quick way out of this?

Why wont vendors give a set, without lights so we can place our own lights along with the light ready set?

Matt_Castle

vijayasimhabr said:

The problem is, each extra light adds to the overall light of the room, which is extra rendering time. 

It (normally) isn't, actually.

Most ray tracing engines start their ray paths from the camera, and path trace out until the ray finds a light source (or reaches the defined maximum path length), so adding more sources actually reduces the average path length by increasing the likelihood any bounce will collide with a light source.

It sounds counter intuitive (given it's the opposite way to real life), but because there's only one camera with a small area lens, but many lights usually with a larger area, it's more efficient to start from the camera (thus presupposing that the path intersects the camera) and hope that path eventually reaches a light than it is to start from each light and hope that ray reaches the camera.

So, is there a quick way out of this?

Sure. Select everything in the scene (or, if you prefer, just the set items), go into the Surfaces Pane Editor Tab in "All" mode and change the collective "Emission Color" to black, then go to the Lights pane and (again in "All" mode) collectively set all luminances to zero.

PerttiA

https://www.daz3d.com/iray-light-manager-pro

vijayasimhabr

Matt,

Ah! I see. Thank you for that explanation and Iray interpretation of multiple lights. I will stop worrying too much about that then.

Now, about your suggestion. Nothing that you have suggested matches with the set, I am working with. For one thing, there is nothing under lights. It appears that the set does not actually use any explicit lights. All of them are linked to surfaces.

And, when i go all with the set selected, It does not select every light item under Luminances. I get exactly one. So, either I am doing something (I will try your step out over this week with different sets), or this set has a different kind of setup.

Thank you, as always, for your advice.

PerttiA,

I have wishlisted it. Thank you for the link.

[Ultimately, this is what worked for me]

Fortunately the asset I am working with - Toolbox Studio - has put all lights with the title 'Light'. So, I was able to locate each light group. Further, this vendor is using something called instances, which have a single light source as their 'mother' light. So, instead of spending hours, I was able to locate all the mother lights in a few minutes and I was able to get my pitch dark setup, just the way I wanted.