How to gain flexibility to art direct my animation in post-process

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

Hi. I am doing a small sim; I did it in Houdini and imported it as an ABC. I added all the rest in Blenders and used cycles to render.

This is the rendered animation in a super low sample:

Animating the lights in cycles and keyframing them differently at different moments is time-consuming. I am wondering if there are ways to render all on, and with some help with passes, I could turn off and on the sphere/lamp I want with the same results. So, in a way, having frames that contemplate all the light and non-light of each one and then I turn on and off what I want in compost.

I imagine this is possible, but not sure how to set the scene to make it work. Initially, I need to use EXR multi-layer, right?

Thank you

2

I believe this can be accomplished via light groups:

3

Even If I use an emissive shader instead of a “light object”?

4

Yep, it works with emissive shaders as well:

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