hi steef,
you have to create a normal area light, under the mental ray tab of that area light, you have to enable “Use Light Shape” and under the dropdown list of “Type” you can choose “Sphere”! Thats about it! But for o.vs. tutorial to work, you dont have to use a sphere area light, as long as it is an area light enabled in the mental ray section of the light!
Hope this helps 
Thanx Visor,
i finally got it.
I do have a follow up question though…
Is it also possible to have several sourcelights with the same presets…?
Thus controlling them all at the same time…
I’m trying to make a cassette ceiling for a club that we are designing,
and the internal part of all cassettes have to emit light,
before i used all area lights and incandescense,
but using 195 area lights with full detail furniture underneath made
my laptop go ballistic
i’m trying to find a sollution seing i need to make an animation…
if anybody has any suggestions i would be highly thankfull
thanx
Steef
yes u can… i has to be one geometry…
so if u have lets say 20 or 2000 
geometry objects, that should emit light do it as followed:
select all objects (geometry) - make them polys (if they are something other…)
go to mesh (maya 8) or polygon (maya 7) -> combine
and NAME the new node!!! u’ll need the transform node name for futher usage
Hello!
Are there any news about that?
I am asking because I spent some time now trying to get this to work in Maya8, but failing after making ambitious efforts (I think).
Setting up the scene with the Maya AreaLight is leading to very strange effects in rendering like objects lighting the scene that are not connected to the geoShader.
And as already pointed out, setup with a pointLight works fine, but is missing the tab with the mrAreaLight Settings.
Anybody with a clue?
Regards,
Nando.
hey nando,
I couldnt get “normal” results with the areaLight either. The only way I could make it really work was by using a spotlight turned to an arealight. If you havent tried this yet, have a look. If it doesnt work for you, I could prepare a scene for you!
Just let me know, hope this helps.
Greetz
Pascal
Yeah, I did tests with spotLights too, but results were dependent on how the spot was orientated which isn’t really suprising, right? Playing around, I even tried to manipulate the spot with a mrPointLightShader, leading nowhere, unfortunately.
I was thinking of adding back the mr_AreaLight Attrs to the pointLightShape, since “… Any of the standard spot and point lights can be turned into an area light source…” (mr Docs). But I didn’t further investigate this yet, perhaps someone of you tried?
Any hints welcome.
nando.
Adding back the mrAreaLight Attrs to the pointLight works. You could set the AreaLight Attrs and they get translated to MR as expected - also the whole objectLight Idea behaves fine. [b]
BUT[/b]!!! It’s a really really dirty hack - of course, at least by only copying the Maya7 “AEmentalrayPointLight.mel” into the Maya8 User Script Dir. You would have to connect a mrLightShader too for this to work (like mrpointLight or geoLight etc) else you would get an error message saying “the areaLight attribute on point lights is obsolete” … yesss, I know!
sofar, nando.
hi,
i’ve a problem…when i use th ctrl_objectlights in maya8.5 everything works becuse the object emits light but is not illuminated…
can anybody help me??
Thank you
Sbalordito,
Im having the same problem in 8.5. (Object light remains black) Did you manage to get it working? Or has anyone else had any luck with it?
Thanks in advance.
Hi everybody i just found this thread and im really interested im trying to getr accurate neon lights … i wonder if i can use this with renderman for maya or render in mental ray and composite back ?
it looks great ill check the thread for info thank u
Arian,
My guess is the files for this shader are compiled for pc not osx so unless you get a mac or maybe linux complie i dont think it will work completely. I’ve tried to get a couple of Ctrl shaders to work on my mac at work and havent had any luck.
I think the mac is expecting a .so shader library file.
Works on my pc at home though.
I’ve tried everything in the last 4 hours to make this awesome shader work with no luck, I even went step by step through the tutorial written in the previous page. I’m running Maya 8.5 x64 on Vista x64 Ultimate. I guess my system is just not supported?:sad:
I think it works on 32 bit Maya only. One of the big reasons why I can’t effectively switch over to 64 bit maya is because these wonderful shaders sometimes aren’t supported.
Terence
I ended up doing a surface shader and sampler info to dim down the glow…I hope this is ported to 64bit…I would do it myself if I knew how to write Shaders.
Dear Francescaluce,
is there a 64bit version of objectlights ? At work i only have windows/maya 8.5 64bit and a linux cluster …
i hope you read this cause you weren´t here for long 
@leif3d i could give it to a friend if we could get the sourcecode
anyone from ctrl studio can please update the geolights to maya 8.5 32bit anda 64bit, please, please…
