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parenting light to crowd agents


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I don't think parenting a light is going to be effective in a crowd situation. Maybe if your agent count is low, less than twenty? The Rivet can be used for that. What you might want to consider is making a group out of certain primitives on the agent mesh, then generate a single mesh from all the agents, delete all the primitives except that group. Use the result as a meshlight, if your render system supports that. Another approach might be to use that same group, but apply an emissive material instead of a true light. That can lead to noisy final images or long render times, though.

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an even easier way would be to use an agent unpack set to "joints". The points will have orient attributes and you can use that to position your lights.

In the attached example I've added put a tube in my agents hand using as copy to points, it should give you some ideas.

agent_unpack_joints_v1.hip

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Here is an extension to Doc's scene to include multiple agents with the end of the torch turned into a meshlight.

The active radius is set to 2 to demonstrate the area affected by each portion of the single mesh light. Disable this checkbox for a more global illumination type effect.

Untitled-1.jpg

 

Here is an image with active radius disabled.

crowd_holds_light.thumb.jpg.813cdcfad3bdd7b675a181f46437cb0b.jpg

ap_agent_unpack_joints_v1.hiplc

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Thanks for that alternate setup. It does look like LOPs can't instance more than ten lights, however. When I set the agent count to 72 the transforms for the light icon are instanced, but the rendering of the illumination quits after ten. Maybe there is an override max count somewhere?

crowd_holds_light.jpg

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