Chief Architect's light sets are there to provide you with more control over the
lights turned on in your plan,
and to enable you to turn on and off relevant lights efficiently.
I'm going to open a plan in which I have finished placing my light fixtures.
So to begin with,
I'm going to view the lights in my plan by going to 3D,
lighting, adjust lights.
This will open my default light set,
which as you can see has every single light in that plan turned on.
This is a large home so it has a lot of lights.
The more lights that are turned on,
the more video memory it will use when I'm in a camera view.
So I want to create some light sets so that I only use the lights needed for
that particular camera view.
When I take a camera view in my master bedroom for instance,
I don't need to have the lights through the rest of the house turned on.
So I'm going to begin by creating a new set and calling it master bedroom set
and I'll select okay.
You can see it switched us over to the master bedroom set and every light by
default is turned off.
So now I can go through and I'm going to go down and find the master bedroom.
I have all of my lights divided by room at this point.
So I want to turn on all of the master bedroom and the master bath lights.
So I'm just going to go down the list and I can click each one or I can select
one, scroll down, select shift,
click down to the bottom of the list so that all of the master bath and master
bedroom lights are selected at once.
Then I'm simply going to click one of them on and it will turn all the master
bedroom and bathroom lights on at the same time.
If I want to make changes to each of these lights individually,
I can select them within the plan or I can double click to open one up.
That is going to open up the specification dialog for this particular light.
So if I were to make a change,
I'll come down to my light data and let's change the lumens to 2850,
select okay. You can see now my lumens have changed,
the intensity is now set at 2850.
Now if I were to go over to the default light set,
notice that it also made that change in the default light set.
Any changes made to the light itself are global,
so if I were to change how many lights are in a fixture, where it's located,
whether it's a spot point or parallel light, the intensity,
the color, what view it's used in or whether or not it casts shadows,
all of those are going to change in all of your light sets,
they're not specific to light set that you have set up.
The only thing that will change based on the light set is whether or not the
light is turned on.
Now for my master bedroom set if I wanted to have my closet door open or the
office door open,
I might want to turn on the lights in those particular rooms as well,
but I'm going to leave them closed.
So in that case all I need are the master bedroom lights and the master bathroom
lights turned on, I'll select done.
And now let's take a camera view of the master bedroom.
So I'm going to select my full camera,
click and drag somewhere in my master bedroom,
which is going to open up my default full camera settings.
Now to adjust my lighting set, I'm going to go to 3D, edit active camera.
So by default it's set to automatic with a maximum number of lights of eight.
This is going to choose eight lights and it's going to prioritize them by
choosing lights in the same room of higher intensity that are closer to the
camera, before it chooses other lights that are further away. However,
we've created a light set so I'm gonna switch over to light set and I'm going to
choose the master bedroom set. Now when I select okay,
it will make sure that all relevant lights are turned on.
But if I were to then move this camera to the other room,
which I'm going to select my floor plan view.
Then I'll select my camera and I'm going to move it into the living room area.
So I'll hold down my control key to free up my snap settings and simply move it
over into the living room area. Then when I double click to open it up,
you can see that all the lights along this ceiling are turned off in the living
room. The sunlight is still on however,
this will make a very large difference if you're using a technique like the
physically based or like the ray trace,
both of which rely more heavily on the lights available in the room.
So now that we're in the living room,
I'm going to create a new lighting set for this area.
So I'm going to go into edit active camera,
which can also be found under the 3D menu,
and I'm going to go down to my lighting and select to adjust lights.
Now I'm going to go to my default light set.
Before I do that,
you want to make sure that you've unchecked update lighting automatically.
This is especially important if you have a very large plan because if you just
switch over to the default light set,
it's going to turn on every single light in your plan.
So if you have a lot of lights in your plan and you switch over to this default
light set and update lighting automatically as checked,
that's going to turn on every light in the plan,
which might overwhelm the memory of your computer.
So I like to just leave that unchecked and I can click to select update when I'm
ready. So once I've switched over to the default light set,
I'm going to select new set,
I'm going to name it living room area select okay.
And then I'll scroll down until I find the family room,
turn them on.
I'm going to come down to the kitchen because it is adjacent to the area that
we're in, so that lighting will effect where I'm at.
And I'm going to come down to the living room,
make sure all of those are turned on.
And again I'm using my shift key to select all of the lights in the room before
I select to turn them on. And I'm just going to scroll down,
make sure we have everything. Um,
I'll turn on these two sunroom lights because they are at least adjacent to this
area. Then I'll select done,
make sure we have our living room area set, select okay,
and all the lights in my room will turn on.
Now because the lighting set is in the camera itself.
If I saved the active camera
and then exit out of it,
that camera is going to hold all of the lighting that we just created.
So if I open it up you can see the lighting set is within that camera.
So now if I were to create another camera again back in the master bedroom,
I would change the lighting set by editing the active camera,
change over to the master bedroom set,
maybe change the rendering technique to our physically based as well.
Then select okay, and then save this camera,
which can also be found in the 3D menu, save active camera.
Exit out of here
and now each of these cameras have different lighting settings based on the room
that they're in. So while light sets take some time to set up,
once you've created them they can give you a lot of control over the lights
turned on and off in your plan to preserve your computers video memory,
while also maximizing your rendering quality.