Changing Light color en masse
Doc Acme
Posts: 1,153
As the topic says, what's the process for changing the color temp of all or a selected grouping of lights in DS?
I picked up an older product, The Western Saloon ( https://www.daz3d.com/western-saloon ) the other day. It's actually a very nice, detailed set but I was put off getting it for the longest time largely due to the promo photos.
Thought I knew how, but not getting the selection filter right or something. And there are 24 lanterns lighting the set.
Now, how to get rid of that hideous sodium vapor lighting inside in one fell swoop?
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I use Light Manager Pro by V3Digitimes. It lets you change the light colour and other options of multiple light sources at once.
I'll investigate.
Simple and free option to change the overall color temperature of a scene is to change Environment Tint under Render settings. What you need to know that it works on the principles traditional color photography. So you have to use opposite colors on the color wheel. So to make the scene yellowish, like in the sample, you'd have to make the environment tint light blue.
There is also White Point under Tone Mapping. As far as I know it does the same thing but without the opposite color part.
Here’s another free option that I just experimented with. In the first image below, I have added three, white point lights and a plane primitive. The next image is a 3Delight render. In the third image, I have selected all three lights. In the Parameters tab (or Lights), I expanded the properties of all three lights and selected the light property for all three. Then, I changed the color to green and this effect took place for all of the lights.
Perhaps you could try this with the lanterns in the saloon. Instead of trying to do all 24 at one time, perhaps you could change them in smaller clusters of 4 to 6 lanterns.
I don't have DAZ Studio open right now, but I think it was something like:
Select all lights you want to affect. Go to the Parameters tab, select All (the 1st option, above Currently Used and Favorites). Adjust light colour and/or temparature as you wish, it will affect all selected lights.
For emissives, select all emissive items you want to affect. Go to the Surfaces tab. Hold down the control key (I think? or was it command?) and select all emissive surfaces of all items. Adjust light colour and/or temparature as you wish, it will affect all selected lights.
The white point BTW is set to normal as this is an interior/exterior set.
And they're all emmisives, not lights it turns out.
And that's the real problem. How how get those to the point where you CAN you select them? Easily.
That seems like a lot of individual clicking to get them selected.
For the exact situation you're describing, that's why I use light manager pro. Huge time saver and for me it's easy to use.
If all the emissives are using the same map, or same diffuse color or some other field that they share and is unique, you should be able to right click on a surface with the surface selection tool and get an option for "select all surfaces with X". I don't have Studio open to look up the exact window dialogue, but I believe that's functionality built into Studio and not an add on. This will at least save you time on hunting and clicking if you want to select multiple surfaces and adjust it manually.
If all your lights have "light" in their name (light ceiling 1, light wall 2, etc), it is easy to select them all. And it is generally a good idea to have this kind of systematic naming convention.
@AlmightyQUEST makes a good point about being able to selectt all items of a certain type that share the same map. It depends on how the vendor created the product. I recently bought a product that had about a dozen screens in it and I wanted to change the screen image on all of them at one time. Unfortunately, the vendor did set up the screens that way and I had to change each of them individually.
@alainmerigot make another good point in filtering items in a tab by entering a name such as "light" or "latern" that all of the items, hopefully, have in common.
I did explore using emissives. In the first image below, I have added three, small spheres and a plane primitive. I added an Iray Uber Base preset shader to the spheres all at once to establish an emission channel for each sphere; I changed the emission color to white. The next image is an Iray render. In the third image, I have selected all three spheres in the Scene tab and then in the Surfaces tab, expanded the properties of all three spheres and selected the emission color property for all three. Then, I changed the color to green and this effect took place for all of the lights. The last image is another Iray render.
Perhaps you could try this with the lanterns in the saloon. Instead of trying to do all 24 at one time, perhaps you could change them in smaller clusters of 4 to 6 lanterns. You should only have to go through this process one time after which you save your scene for reuse later.
Wow. Please, no need to spend this much time & effort. Only reason for wanting a more normal color lighting was to evaluate the texture properly. I can do that by other means.
But, since we're here, this is what part of the scene looks like, and the Scene Panel, and Surfacing.
While this would be nice to know how to do, natively, I think this thread has demonstrated it ISN'T an easy, intuitive process in DS.
There are lots of things like that. Fortunately, Daz Studio has a scripting language that people can use to create utilities.
If you use the surface selection tool and right click on one of the emissive surfaces does it give you the optiont to select all surfaces ith that emission color? since it changed the color in that channel it might be the same value for all of them. I don't remember if that channel is an option though.
It does not work like that, unless all the other surfaces are instances of surface you fiddle with.
What do you mean? If you have multiple surfaces selected you can set a value for all of those surfaces at once, is that not the goal here?
So it looks like for emission what you would want to do is right click with the surface selection tool and use the "Select all surfaces with the value of..." which will bring up a menu and select the channel. However if other things you don't want to change have the same value, they will be selected as well. But it's worth a try to save some time if they surfaces you want to change do all share the value.
That works for the diffuse channel, which is not what's used to colour emissives.
If you have multiple surfaces selected, you can set the value for any shared channels between them. The only thing that won't work is if you have multiple surfaces that are using a different shader where they don't all share the channel, then it will only affect surfaces that have that channel. You can set values for emission color, emission temperature, luminance, etc.
Which version of DS are you using? The tool has had the option to select by any property for a while, but not always.
Oooh. Had to dig deeper. I've only ever noticed it for the diffuse channel. TIL. Thanks folks.
Anyway, I'm on the current public build.
The most recent public release: 4.20xxx