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Andrew W

08-21-2005, 06:42 PM

Hello All,

I've been taking a sabbatical from VFX for a little while now as there have been several personal projects I've been meaning to get some work done on and movies kept getting in the way. One of these projects is a tool for Maya to allow the user to control a whole bunch of lights from within one interface and be able to group lights together to behave as one. It's something I've felt I needed for a while and I couldn't find anything that did what I needed on the internet. So I've been writing one.

It's called Light Manager and the online docs are here (http://www.andrew-whitehurst.net/lightManager.html). The link to the MEL script is at the top of the docs page. I'm certain it's far from perfect yet but I'd appreciate any feedback you can give. How you found it to use, whether it works correctly in your version of Maya, any bugs etc? All that kind of thing. I've been using it myself for a little while and it's now time to set it free into the wild for everyone else to have a go with.

Assuming my schedule doesn't get ridiculous again anytime soon I'll be making tweaks as I go so you may want to check by semi-regularly for the latest (and theoretically best) version.

I hope you find it useful.

Many thanks,

Andrew

lazzhar

08-21-2005, 09:29 PM

Hey thanks Andrew, nice tool :)

bahman

08-21-2005, 10:25 PM

Thanks Andrew
Very cool tool for handle large number of lights which are acting as a one source light.

elis

09-29-2005, 01:37 AM

thanks Andrew,cool tool
good job!!:applause:

gga

09-30-2005, 04:35 PM

Andrew, I am afraid this tool needs work.
You should probably take a look at abLightTweaker (at highend3d), which does almost everything your tool does and more, with an interface that uses much less screen space.
You should probably use light sets instead of your own groups/light parameter stored as strings. The reason is that those light sets can easily be hooked up to, for example, mental ray shaders in the lights parameter. The other reason is that it makes handling of renaming lights/groups automatic and it takes less space on disk.
Finally, you should add some way to animate the parameters and, possibly, display the current settings when you select one of the named parameters.

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