Clipping of instanced lights

[Sustaxata]

Hi everyone!
 

I'm currently working on a fairly "illuminated" scene, where I use loads of dim instanced point lights. Normal lights provide the option of setting an attenuation radius, which usually speeds up rendertime a lot, but the "light template" does not provide that option.

As shaders I use the asadlight and rayshadow. Asadlight has something similar, which is an attenuation ramp that gets multiplied with the attenuation, so you can set it to black after a certain distance. I know this should visually have the same effect, but is it as efficient as the radius option in the normal point light?

Is there any other way to "clip" light?

The reason I'm asking about this is because I set the attenuation radius to black after a certain distance. I set up a render and it takes ages, despite the fact, that its only in range of about 4 lights. Once I deactivate the other lights, the render goes super fast.

 

 

Any advice, experience, wisdom or other info is much appreciated!

 

 

Thanks a lot

Sustaxata

[anim]

so just instance normal houdini light that has active radius

here is simple example with instanced lights and radius and color controlled by point attributes

 

ts_light_instance_w_active_radius.hip

[Sustaxata]

Thanks for the answer, I am sorry it took me so long to reply, I'm currently not at my workstation. However I did try to instance normal pointlights, and it works fine in the example files, but for some reason it only works with light template in the scene I am working on. I will upload it as soon as I get back to my machine.
Does that mean, there is no binding reason to use the light template for instanced lights?

Thanks for the scenefile, great example
_______________________________
Yes you were right, it worked fine with instancing normal lights, I must have done something wrong in the previous attempts

Cheers man

Edited May 8, 2014 by Sustaxata