For example, I have well-tuned scene lighting established in a scene, for example with all lights grouped into subnet or asset.
Is there any way to enable/disable all the lights with a few clicks?
As i found, it completely ignores visibility parameter of light in both viewport and render…
The only way to disable/enable all the lights with a single click I found is to connect their “contributes to …” parameters to a single check box somewhere, but it's not convienient i think.
Am I missed something?

all the lights could be selected in the network editor at once, and those parameters (common) could be clicked. I guess also put in a “take”

Yup, the Take is good idea if you do this often

Other ideas:

1) Select all the Lights (or even all objects with ‘a’ over the network view) and set the Dimmer to 0. Any Light with Dimmer set to zero will not even be sent to the renderers, so even if the those lights were meant to generate shadowmaps they will no longer. You can pretend the Dimmer is toggle, to a degree - if you don't actually use the value of the dimmer to set your lighting balance.

2) Another way is to just set up the ROP you're rendering with to exclude the lights - in the Contributing Lights parameter.

Hope this helps,
Jason

Yeah, I use bundles for everything when lighting, makes it dead simple to just have “nolights” bundle or something similar, then no need to modify dimmers etc.

Cheers,

Peter B

pbowmar
Yeah, I use bundles for everything when lighting, makes it dead simple to just have “nolights” bundle or something similar, then no need to modify dimmers etc.

Wait, I can't get it. You mean no lights bundle for rendering? Yes, it's ok then - I have to use that bundle in a ROP, right?.
But what if i need to temporary off all the lights and return to default one just in order to see my scene more clearly in viewport? How can I do that without actual modifications of light parameters?
Something like “smooth shade with default light” in a viewport like maya have would be great, but I can't find such mode.

jason_iversen
1) Select all the Lights (or even all objects with ‘a’ over the network view) and set the Dimmer to 0. Any Light with Dimmer set to zero will not even be sent to the renderers, so even if the those lights were meant to generate shadowmaps they will no longer. You can pretend the Dimmer is toggle, to a degree - if you don't actually use the value of the dimmer to set your lighting balance.

Using dimmer is a good idea, but unfortunately it's a good light intensity control also, so I'm using it a lot in my lighting setups. It has different values in different lights, and I can't just reset all of them to zero forgetting all the values inside them…

andrewlowell
all the lights could be selected in the network editor at once, and those parameters (common) could be clicked. I guess also put in a “take”

Take will help with it but only when I use takes just for that. But what if I already have some take structure in a scene? It will be needed to have the same amount of “nolight” sub-takes for each take I already has… Isn't it?

You can also turn off “Diffuse” and “Specular” on the light which will then also turn them off in OpenGL.

I find the default Houdini lights quite lacking compared to what's available by default in other packages. In a previous job, we created our own light object that had many more controls, UI widgets and much better shaders that gave the controls (and more) that you're looking for.

Unfortunately, the Light Linker wasn't usable after we did this, as it is hard-coded to work only with default Houdini Lights and Objects (

Hopefully someday there will be a major upgrade to the lights and default shaders to catch Houdini up with 3DS and Maya etc.

Cheers,

Peter B

Using dimmer is a good idea, but unfortunately it's a good light intensity control also, so I'm using it a lot in my lighting setups. It has different values in different lights, and I can't just reset all of them to zero forgetting all the values inside them…

I actually never, ever use the dimmer(except perhaps in a rush or near delivery) precisely for this reason - it's the way I turn lights on/off. I just fiddle with hsv colour for light brightness instead(I rarely think in rgb terms - hsv seems more ‘natural’ to me). I agree it would be nice if Houdini lights had a “render” switch, as it were. I don't like the notion of the display flag being used for this, though - it needs to be it's own beast, on the render flag would make sense(although perhaps illumination would be more practical).

Cheers,

J.C.