I’m rendering a mall in C4D R21, which has a building structure, and x4 separate shop sets which are cloned along a spline, that follows the building curved front.
Inside each different shop set, I have a group of PBR spot lights.
I can successfully get the cloned lights to emit if I disable all the shop sets in the clone object but one. As soon as there is more than one active shop set all the cloned lights stop emitting.
the clone objects are set to instance (not render instance), and as I said I can get x1 set of lights cloned to work, but not all.
Is there any ProRender limitation not in the C4D documentation that prevents this? because it works in the advance renderer.
To my understanding, the limit in R21 is around 100 spot lights, and I’m not aware if there an option to increase this. I have no information about how that might be a hardware related limit.
Yes, there is no mention in the Manual.
All the lights are emitting. It’s just that there is a couple in one of the shops which have a wider angle of illumination, covering more area.
For some reason, even at the same intensity, they seem to illuminate more, and thus decreasing the intensity of the others in the render.
If a light covers more area, shouldn’t it illuminate with the same strength per cm2? in this case, it seems to increment the power proportionally with the angle!
This would be the case in real life unless you use a lens in front of the light.
Is there any way to make a PBR light to emit with the same intensity despite of the angle covered?
Furthermore, the main problem I have with the lights in this scene, is that as I have more and more active lights, the visible intensity of them decreases proportionally even if the intensity value is kept the same!
It does look like the total visible light power is shared between the number the lights added to the scene?
Is there a way to avoid this? so each light is independent?
This is driving me nuts…makes no sense this behaviour.
You will notice that I have used a normal Area light (z-direction only) and a Cylinder without caps. This “Altman-Spot” like set up uses a black material and a Render Tag.
It should render with a more significant number than you need it in the scene.
If you must work with Spotlights, as that seems to be the stopper, I can only suggest the support route.
You scene takes a while to render, and each iteration adds to the invested time, my answers are a little delayed.
When I get larger scenes like that, it is quite some work to really see through the whole set up. Yes, everyone has his/her own idea of how things have to work. The ProRender is undoubtedly in active development, as you might feel when using S22.
This late afternoon I explored your scene more in detail. I took one shop with the lights in a new scene. I’m not certain about a few things. So I replaced the glass panes with a simple cube. I’m not sure if the refraction of the glass will be really visible in the final render, refraction of 1.0 should be nearly not noticeable to the render intensive refraction.
The mesh of that one shop had a lot of flipped polygons.
Many materials have lots of channels enabled where I’m not clear why that is. Some have the parameter set, so there isn’t a real effect of it.
Hi varval,
Yes, everyone has his/her own idea of how things have to work. The ProRender is undoubtedly in active development, as you might feel when using S22.
Yes, probably I simply don’t understand why those lights behave like that, and there’s a reason for that!
Dr. Sassi - 21 April 2020 02:26 AM
The mesh of that one shop had a lot of flipped polygons.
Many materials have lots of channels enabled where I’m not clear why that is. Some have the parameter set, so there isn’t a real effect of it.
Yeah, the shops are from a purchased pack. the geometry was very Hi-Poly which I poly-reduced. maybe something got wrong in the reduction.
The materials were supposedly made for the Advanced Renderer. Maybe the Company I bought the sets from isn’t the best, but they are well known.
The main power of the ProRenderer, from my point of view, is the preview capability. For me, it stops there, and if that is not needed, I will go with the Physical render. The ProRender can be slowed down with the elements in the scene, of course, to a point where no useable editor update is given. Again, that is my very personal take on that. This means that the scene should be optimized. As you did with the shops already. If the shops would have the materials baked in, as well as the lights, I believe you would see a considerable improvement in speed.
As a side note, I hope I did not sound critical here. My intention above was more to point to areas where you can take advantage of some adjustments that would improve the scene.
