Hello having a bit of a problem here,
the viewport works fine with about 5 lights but once I insert the sixth or seven, these new lights and every subsequent ones will not reflect their brightness in the scene - you can imagine how annoying and bizarre this is. Could someone help me out - I’m sure its a memory saving feature because once i delete enough lights, it works again
Hmm yea, afaik it’s just a limiation of OpenGL… eventually you’ll have more lights in your scene than it can cope with. (but, if there is a way around it, I’d be more than interested to hear it! :D)
You could always switch lights off in the viewport by sticking em in layers and turning visiblity off though. 
Hi,
thanks for the feedback - that’s interesting. OpenGL limitation eh? Funny thing is I used to use a Cad render called Artlantis and you can put up to 255 lights and it’ll still work as long as you’ve got mem/cpu power. Will do this thing in layers but you really have to wonder. I hate to use the IPR.
Actually, I think it’s a hardware limitation. ATI workstation graphics cards only support up to 8 light sources. 3Dlabs Wildcat4 graphics cards can support up to 32 lights. I don’t know how many light sources are supported by NVIDIA or Matrox cards. NVIDIA boasts that their nfinite FX engine can render a virtually infinite number of visual effects (which I guess includes lighting effects), but their claim only applies to DirectX, not OpenGL, so ceql may be correct in that case.
:wip:
okay, just wanted to write that the tip does indeed work - I’m actually back in this thread cause just a sec ago, it didn’t want to work - it does now. Retarded. Regardless, how then are lighting techs meant to do lighting in maya? crazy amount of layers or just a really robust graphic card? I’m guessing comping render layers later… ? Hmm
OT - NVIDIA’s recent benchmarks have been savaged to death for being fradulent and external benchmarks haven’t been good - I wouldn’t trust their stats. I’m not a tech head, what’s the diff between OpenGl and Direct X. /ducks from thrown shoe.
** OKAY. the tip works in the view ports but all the lights still render with the layers OFF. WTH?!
Okay, I’ve been doing a little reading, here’s what I’ve found:
(hehe I think me and pomru were both wrong, doh! :p)
About Graphics Cards and “hardware lights” vs “light sources”:
There has been some confusion about the “8 hardware lights” limit. Many have thought that this means the hardware can only handle 8 lights in a scene, which most modern games already exceed on a regular basis. In fact, the GeForce can light each triangle in a scene with 8 lights, but the scene can have as many as the developer wants.
(src: http://www.cdmag.com/articles/023/098/geforce_preview.html )
To reinforce this, there is a really cool old nvidia demo which supports upto 300 lights! 
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/Lights_Demo.html
(When you run it, there’s a sider at the bottom of the window to increase number of lights (There’s also a button to click if you want more than 50), right click drag to move camera, and click the plane to deform it!)
Note that while they are 300 lights that are illuminating the same mesh, each individual triange can never be lit by more than 8 lights simultaneously.
On OpenGL and “limitations”:
Also, I just stumbled on this site :
http://www.opengl.org/developers/code/mjktips/VirtualizedLights/VirtualizedLights.html
The problem is that most OpenGL implementations only support the minimum required number of light sources. Minimum required number of light sources is eight (8). Note: OpenGL implementations are free to support an arbitary number of light sources, but to make hardware accelerated lighting tractable, OpenGL only mandates that at least 8 light sources.
hmm, I was wrong in saying that it was a OpenGL limiation, it looks like it’s a limitation of Maya’s implentation of OpenGL and not OpenGL itself.
However, /me <-- not a programmer or hardware person, and I’m just going by what I’ve read
hehe Thanks GreenGiant! 
I probably won’t be able to update on my site for months as I don’t really have enough to good content to put on there yet! 
/me = flooded by too many assignments right now, and I probably won’t have not much time for 3d for a while (doh!), but I’ve been working towards trying to improve 2d skills in spare time where I can!
Layers is useful to switching on/off what lights ya wanna preview in the viewport, but yea they all render anyway 
I’m don’t really have any lighting skills, so I don’t know how the pros work… /me just likes to stick like GI_Joe lights in one layer, and Key lights in another, and then whatever additional lights in another and just adjust the lights in each layer, and then hit render to see all the lighting combined. (or, I otherwise, I really like mental ray :d~~~)
Hmm, I think there’s scripts on Highend3d (or was it the Mel thread here on Cgtalk?) that lets you render with only the selected lights though!
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