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Lighting Instruments back to Symbols in Correct position


EAlexander

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Hi - I have received a light plot that I need to move to Cinema 4D for rendering.   All the symbols have been converted to lighting instruments - these wont carry over to Cinema.  If I choose the lights and Cmd + K - they go back to being just symbols, but they lose their rotation(s) and all just sit vertical like the base symbols. 

 

Is there any way to make the conversion and keep the rotations?

 

Thanks,

 

e.

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Thanks Kevin. I have a few thousand lights, so mesh isn't an option. I also need them to be symbols so I get instances automatically in Cinema. I rig my moving lights to focus them for renders, and that way, I only need to do one of each kind of light. 

 

I feel like there has to be a way to bake down the positioning info. 

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22 minutes ago, EAlexander said:

Thanks Kevin. I have a few thousand lights, so mesh isn't an option. I also need them to be symbols so I get instances automatically in Cinema. I rig my moving lights to focus them for renders, and that way, I only need to do one of each kind of light. 

 

I feel like there has to be a way to bake down the positioning info. 

 

Ah, that's a different sort of issue. You're asking for them to be symbols and not symbols at the same time. A lighting device is ultimately a collection of symbols oriented in relation to each other to form a custom piece of geometry. Because it itself is not a symbol I'm not sure how its information would transfer across to a C4D rig automatically.

 

The only thing I could imagine would be a collection of positioning data combined with a unique fixture IDs that you could feed into a C4D rig....

 

Kevin

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Nope - not an automated one. 

 

If I export to Cinema as Lighting instruments - the fixtures come into Cinema in the correct position, but they are all actual geometry, not symbols with instances.  My machines can even handle that much geometry, but texturing each fixture and lens for lighting was just going to be too much work.

 

If I convert them back to symbols from lighting instruments - then they come in rotated back to baseline angle, but the xyz positioning is still correct.  This set was an array of truss fingers all lined with X bars...hundred and hundred of them as well as Sharpys and Robe Blades.  This way, I have one master model for each fixture and everything else is an instance.

 

So - I ended up doing the second option to manage poly count and only have to texture 5 instruments instead of hundreds.  Fortunately, Cinema's rotate tool has an option to apply rotate on a per object basis, so I could grab one whole row of x bars and rotate them by eye back into the correct position.  Took a while, but worked okay.

 

I would very much like a better solution to this though.

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I'm not a Vectorscript wizard by any stretch,  but it seems like a vectorscript should be able to take a selection of lights as input, step through each one,  grabbing the x, y rotations from it, storing them as a variable,  convert it back to a symbol, and then 3D rotate it back with the stored x, y rotations,  then rinse and repeat it's way through the rest of the selection.

 

Perhaps this should also be a wishlist item.   I would imagine it's "working as designed" but I can't think of any reason why the current functionality would be desired over the proposed rotated result.

Edited by Wesley Burrows
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