Exactly. Cycles currently is really good with all the things it should have but they seem to have forgotten about lighting tech. To any lighting artist, no light linking is like having no copy/paste option or undo. I might be a little extreme with that comparison but I am trying to make a point. Working on the small stuff/details is also important. That’s what made me start wondering if it’s difficult for light linking to be included in cycles because it has been absent for a long time but Corona is similar to Cycles and this is possible. Also glare and glow in Lighting is also another feature. Is this possible with cycles without post/compositing?
I should have mentioned Cycles. My apologies. I think it would be better in the light or emission material settings to have a include/exclude option where u can add selected meshes/selection set or group into the tab telling the light to exclude lighting these objects or
include- only light these objects.
I don’t know if u can check out 3dsmax include/exclude lights dialog. Something like that if it’s possible.
Like others have mentioned, Bi’s light linking isn’t a good workflow tbh.
Light linking is a need when it comes to Bake some geometry and not the others, distributing fake lights and choreographing studio lights…I am seeing a possible node like object index might help in this case…maybe assigning an index number to objects which needs to match the index number of the dedicated light…default will be 0
I agree with pitiwazou Guerilla render graph is incredible flexible but i am not sure if this linking system could be made in blender…but since alembic its possible to choose another render engine.
Light linking is a very important feature but I think the best solution would be ray tagging, which would give us light linking but many more options like controlling any object or material, not just lights.
Right now, the devs. don’t have much time for Cycles (outside of mentoring the GSoC students) because it’s all hands on deck for 2.8 related projects.
For the sake of giving users greater freedom in art direction, I would say that light-linking or light groups would be an important thing to have (if the more advanced feature known as ray-tagging doesn’t come first).
The moment where fork versions of Cycles has this feature but Blender does not, baffles me.
They seemed to be working on it but abandoned it after. I can never understand why after 5 years this feature is still no where to be found. This is a very important feature for those who have a very solid knowledge of lighting and this helps tremendously when doing so.
Why do the Blender devs keep omitting things like this? Can someone pls explain to me why this was dropped because It is very frustrating if I am to be very honest.
Simple answer is that if you need it NOW then K-Cyles (or eCycles) provides this feature if required.
Complex answer: in development some things fall by the wayside. There were/are many other things that also need to be focused on, and I suppose light linking is a ‘nice to have’ feature rather than an “absolute must”.
From a purist view of lighting it does “break” the rules in favour of looks.
Brecht asked for more use cases, but in that thread only one (character rim lighting) was provided. Perhaps if users had given him more essential show-stopping examples in production, he’d have implemented by now?
Not sure.
edit light groups were another requested feature, which seems to be implemented now. So the devs are aware, and I am hopeful we’ll have light linking in vanilla Cycles sometime as well.
Keep in mind that for most of the 10 years since Cycles debuted, there has not been a single developer whose job was ‘just Cycles’. Brecht had to take a lot of time away of it to oversee 2.8 development for instance.
That has changed in the last year, but a lot of work is still taken up by ensuring Cycles can run on up to 4 brands of GPU’s (with each having their own API and kernel size tolerance). In that case it is fortunate we have developers from Apple and AMD at least offering assistence.
