Mental Ray And Light Linking

MikeF

I'm working on a scene using maya 2008 and i've got a few specific objects that need to be better lit for a final render with mental ray.
i'm turning off illuminates by default and i'm linking to the specific object in the relationship editor. When i do a hardware or software render it works as it should, but when i use mental ray the light illuminates everything regardless.

i would just do some render layers but everything has to be output as one piece.

any ideas?

mdeforge

You may want to hit up CGSociety or the mental ray forum for this one. I wish I could help. I know a good amount about Mental Ray, but I've never had to use light linking before. That's too bad you can't use layers, it would be a quick fix then. Is there some sort of material tweak you can make?

Sharvo

Hey, I use light linking alot of the time when doing stills, I have never heard of that problem though, it would be good to see your render set up and your light linking attributes as we could be guessing all day.

The only problem i had was that it would link everything even when i tried to take things off, i would just have to close and open the maya file.

But then again it maybe a buggy version of maya, mine doesnt do transfer maps! So you may need to reinstall?

But as Stradigos said cgsociety or 3dtotal may know more!

sl0throp

I believe that pre Maya 2009 Mental Ray might be using its own centric approach to light linking still. It has been awhile but I remember that it used numbers in the light linking to specify how it was linked. If you look under the mental ray tab in the light there should be a light linking parameter that should have a a setting that you can change i.e light linking [0] - you will have to read up on what number and how to use this but I remember it was not that intuitive. As a potentially wrong memory it was something lime 0 = all light 1 = linked 2 = not linked or something like that. I a pretty sure you had to do this in the corresponding geo as well...Maya 2008 was a real dog of an upgrade with 2009 being a huge improvement.

MikeF

thanks guys, i'l see what i can come up with