Instancing lights in H13

[TomRaynor]

Hi,

 

I am trying to find the best and most efficient way to instance a shit-tonne of lights onto a set of points. I would like the lights to be a mixture of area lights, point lights and spot lights. I probably want IES profiles plugged into the lights as well.

 

There seem to be a bunch of different ways to do instancing in Houdini and I am left confused as to which is generally the preferred way at this moment in time. I have checked out Peter Quint's vimeo tutorial on light instancing:

 

http://vimeo.com/8681435

 

But I am wondering whether it is a bit outdated now?

 

I have also tried setting up an instance node at object level object merging a bunch of points inside it and tried using both fast and full point instancing. It seems to kind of work correctly with point and area lights, but weirdly when I try and use a spot light, the lights all seem to be in very strange positions in the viewport. I have attached a hip file for reference.

 

Is the instance node a bit buggy with lights?

Do you have to use "full point instancing" with the instance node?

Is there a better way to instance lots of lights?

Do you have to use particles to instance lights onto or can you just use points?

How can I get per point colour inherited onto instanced lights?

 

Thanks very much,

Tom

instancingLights_v01.hip

[Owl]

Hi, Tom, 

I think there might be way ("override properties" with light material?), but usually I use point()  expression with instancepoint() instead of point number, and yeah spotlight geometry explodes