Interior DesignLight and Rendering

Controlling lights with LuxRender Light groups

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Allan Brito June 5, 2009

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There are a lot of great features and tools in LuxRender that can really help any architectural visualization artist, which uses Blender to model his works to create photo realistic renders. I was testing some of the features introduced lately in LuxRender and one of the features that really caught my attention was the Light group tool. The tool is very similar to the Multi light feature available in Maxwell Render and the working principles are the same. With a set of different light groups created, we can control the intensity of a light source on the scene while the image is still rendering.

Can't image how that works? Take a look into this video that I record from a project that I'm working on.

This is a project of a restaurant study I'm working on, and as you can see in the video, there isn't much to see yet. I promise to publish the renders of the complete project when everything is created and with lots of furniture models populating the room.

Notice that there are two light groups on the scene:

• Sun light
• Sconces

The video was recorded while the rendering was still happening, and every time I tried to change the intensity of the Sun group, the whole image shifts from a daylight scene to a night rendering with artificial light.

A tool like that could really help on the process of create different versions of the same image as lighting study. With the changes on the light, all we have to do is copy the image and paste it into some image editor to save all different versions.

To setup a scene like this, we have to create the light groups in the LuxBlend interface. If we give the same light group name to more than one light source, all those lights will be controlled by the same slider. I'm working on a more detailed tutorial about the use of Light Groups in LuxRender and may be publishing it in a few days.