Stacking Light sets? Possible?

Griffin Avid

Am I correct in understanding that you can only have 1 light set active at a time in a scene and that they do not "stack"?
So If I load a LIGHTS preset, it adds the bundled lights for that scene and the individual light sources populate the Scene tab.

Adding ANOTHER light set from a different environment/product will REPLACE the previous set and not add- yet another LAYER of lightning for that scene....

 

Yes?

Is there a way to combine light sets (no sky domes, just the suns and lights....) into a  scene or even double the light without editing fstop, exposure, gamma etc....?

fastbike1

I just loaded 5 light sets. from 5 vendors. Similarly, you can add multiple individual spots or combinations. IIRC, these is a limit to how many lights can be used, but I don't remember what the limit.

See attached.

Tobor

To add to Fastbike's comments, it depends on the vendor. There's one set form a popular vendor here that will remove lights and even your own cameras if you apply a preset from the set. Clearly not a great design choice for more advanced users, but it's possible to work around it. One approach is to make your own individual presets from their components.

You can have only ONE of the following at any time: Dome with HDRi map OR dome with Sun/Sky. While these are two settings in the Iray panel, they use shared resources. You cannot combine Sun/Sky with an HDRi map.

There are some lighting sets that are really Scene presets. As such, they will completely exchange their contents with the preset. These you have to be careful, and watch any warning boxes that asks if you want to save your scene first. These are intended to be loaded first, and then you add your characters and other assets.

After that, you can apply multiple lights, either the built-in D|S types (Spotlight, Distant, etc.) and/or multiple mesh lights. The light source limits are primarily for Interactive mode, where you're limited to 16 sources (and, where mesh lights don't illuminate the scene, so there's no reason to use them). There are limits in the standard Photoreal mode, those are mostly materials based, and of not practical concern for 99% of renders.

Griffin Avid

You cannot combine Sun/Sky with an HDRi map.

I knew it wasn't me and the scene's contents and the lighting kept changing.