Quick and dirty light editor

Eventually we all run across a shot that requires us to have a lot of lights that we want to be able to edit quickly. For myself, it was a downtown street with a slew of street lights. It quickly became tedious to tweak the lights with the attribute editor. This was especially true when I wanted to tinker with the decay rates. You would select a light, open the decay rate pull down, make a selection and repeat over and over – just to find you preferred it better before.

So I quickly wrote some code to create my own simplified attribute spreadsheet:

string $window = `window -title "LightEditor " -widthHeight 600 300`;
paneLayout;

select -r `listTransforms -lights`;
string $activeList = `selectionConnection -activeList`;

spreadSheetEditor -mainListConnection $activeList -ln true -showShapes true ;

showWindow $window;

This gives us a quick spread sheet with access to the defaults: color, intensity, ray trace/depth map shadows, shadow color etc. Great – but my inspiration was to deal with the decay rate and by default it's not listed. This is because only keyable attributes show up in the spreadsheet editor so you miss out on valuable things like dmap resolution/filter, decay rates which, by default, are not keyable.

To fix this we'll make a small proc to make additional values we want keyable visible. Decay rate is unique in that even if made keyable it doesn’t appear so, we'll make a stand in and connect the two.


proc showLightAttributes()
{
string $selection[] = `listTransforms -lights`;
for($obj in $selection)
{
string $shapes[] = `listRelatives -shapes $obj`;
if ( !`objExists ( $shapes[0] +".Decay" )` )
{
addAttr -k true -dv 0 -min 0 -max 3 -at double -ln Decay $shapes[0];
connectAttr ( $obj + ".Decay") ( $obj + ".decayRate");
}

setAttr -k true ( $obj + ".dmapFilterSize");
setAttr -k true ( $obj + ".dmapResolution");
}
}

Now we'll make it easier to execute that code when we need to by making a menu on the light editor. While were at it will add the ablity to reselect all the lights.

The final code:


// SCRIPT: ijLightEditor.mel
// AUTHOR: Ian Jones - mel@shrtcww.com
// DATE: July 29, 2005
// Version: 1.0
//
// DESCRIPTION: Creates a simply mass light editor
//
//
global proc ijLightEditor()
{
string $window = `window -title "LightEditor by Ian Jones" -menuBar true -menuBarVisible true -widthHeight 600 300`;

menu -label "Tools" -tearOff false;
menuItem -label "Re-select Lights" -command ("select -r `listTransforms -lights`");
menuItem -label "Show Light Attributes" -command ("showLightAttributes");

paneLayout;

select -r `listTransforms -lights`;
string $activeList = `selectionConnection -activeList`;

spreadSheetEditor -mainListConnection $activeList -ln true -showShapes true ;

showWindow $window;

}

global proc showLightAttributes()
{
string $selection[] = `listTransforms -lights`;
for($obj in $selection)
{
string $shapes[] = `listRelatives -shapes $obj`;
if ( !`objExists ( $shapes[0] +".Decay" )` )
{
addAttr -k true -dv 0 -min 0 -max 3 -at double -ln Decay $shapes[0];
connectAttr ( $obj + ".Decay") ( $obj + ".decayRate");
}

setAttr -k true ( $obj + ".dmapFilterSize");
setAttr -k true ( $obj + ".dmapResolution");
}
}