Fran Wrote:

Dyret, Clay, Yes I think it is to do with groups, it's incredibly fiddly, and doesn't always work, but now and then if you ungroup an object with more than 1 texture (grouped even if you didn't group it yourself, (Bryce does the grouping on import)).

It does seem to be quite temperamental though, and what's worse, is that once you exclude an object in one light it seems to be excluded in the other light, even if one is a radial and one is a spotlight.

 

There are a few quirks to the Influence feature that I will clear up for you.

Influence is the technical name for Include/Exclude.

The implementatin of this tool is still primitive, but it is workable and it is consistent.

1. The Interface: The Light Lab cannot see inside of groups. You cannot exclude a group. You must exclude each of the individual parts of that group. This is ideal, because sometimes you dont want every part of a group to be influenced by a particular light. Everything is name based. If you have three items in the scene with the exact same name "sphere 1" and you have it selected as excluded, then all of the items named sphere 1 will be excluded by this particular light source. If you change the name of one of them to sphere 2 it will no longer be excluded unless you udpate the light lab again to consider sphere 2.

Make sure you use short names. If you use long names for objects the Light Lab will get confused.

Fran, in the case of your kumquats, you need to rename the innards as "Flesh," not Satsumahalf_SatsumaHalf_etc. The name is waaaay too long for the light lab to identify the item.

Anyhow, once you rename the fleshy innards to "flesh", you then need to ungroup the fruit so that Flesh can be listed in the Exclude list. Simply select Flesh, and it will exclude the fleshy innards of all of the cut fruit.

2. Labs in Bryce are controlled by .mov files. When a slider is moved one way or another it updates the movie file. If the movie file becomes temporarily corrupt, you can get situations where it appears as though the settings assigned to one light are displayed for other lights as well. Unfortunately, this can lead to oddness as observed by Fran. But I've never had a problem with this. I'd say that in this you are in error, each individual light retains its individual settings for Influence once you get it set up correctly as described above.

What I do know is that the memory dots seem to be shared by all lights in the scene. That is unfortunate.

3. There are a couple of bugs with this feature, but minor and predictable. There is an issue with Volumetrics and with a few other things. But generally the feature is stable.

4. Sometimes odd things can happen when shadow casting is disabled on a material that is itself excluded from the Influence of a given light.

Fran, I downloaded your scene and I am playing with it. The Sunlight you've rigged is cool, but I have another wqay of doing it that I think you will like. I think you should be making much more use of Domes. Domes can give you a better soft shadow than your current grouped radials ideal. i will explain more in time.