Light channels names

[George Ioannidis]

Hi Roy,

Lately I am working on rendering with different types of lights in it. Primary goal is to produce night time rendering. There are groups of lights in the model like spot lights, internal lights, lamps, light emitting materials, LED lights, sun, sky.... separated in different channels so they can be altered independently. It would be rally great addition if we could give a "name" to those channels. Currently, channel names like "1, 2" etc. are really not informative and it is difficult to keep in mind or remember which lights are in which channel. I think it would be great to have the option to name channels e.g. "Entrance lights", "Ceiling Lights" and so on.

[akinlolu olugboji]

Always have to have a paper and pen handy when I need more than two channels.  

[Garret Diduck]

+1 

Could the Sun always be in it's own separate channel as well?

[akinlolu olugboji]

Yes once more than one channel is specified in the advance of the lightening panel.

Garret Diduck said:

+1 

Could the Sun always be in it's own separate channel as well?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

It's been on the wishlist for a while-- I'll get to them at some point.  It's "almost" implemented in the stand-alone (they aren't persistent when you save the file.)  Probably not going to separate the sun and sky by default.

[George Ioannidis]

Is that wishlist available somewhere to read? Just to get the idea what else to ask or not? ;)

Thanks Roy for the answer.

Roy Hirshkowitz said:

It's been on the wishlist for a while-- I'll get to them at some point.  It's "almost" implemented in the stand-alone (they aren't persistent when you save the file.)  Probably not going to separate the sun and sky by default.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Nope.  You can always ask.

[George Ioannidis]

Here is where I get playing with tools NXT offers. Rendering is still running (almost 24 hours on AMD X4 machine and there is a lot of "fireflies" still on it :( ) so I did pause it and write down nxt image to play with it in NXT image editor. In image editor we fortunately can name light channels and it's really great tool! I am very happy with the result, my only concern is the extremely long rendering time. On the other hand I understand, that doing just one rendering we can get number of different pictures by simply playing in image editor. The only thing done in GIMP is the background image placement and sharpening filter applied to resulted picture. Enjoy! :D