Issues instancing lights in ICE

[sonictk]

Hi all:

I'm trying to learn ICE and use it in my workflow, and I'm attempting to do a scene where I am trying to use the positions of a point cloud to instance lights. However:

http://i.imgur.com/8FvdqPP.jpg

The light roots are all instanced, but they do not emit any light when I render the scene. I tried to recreate the setup in this simple tutorial but I got the same issue as well.

http://xsisupport.com/2009/12/22/using- ... es-in-ice/

And here too:

Would anyone be kind enough to help me out with what I'm doing wrong here?

[caledonian_tartan]

just checked. it should work, but in my example i needed to set the orientation to 1,0,0,-90.

icelights.jpg

[sonictk]

Oh wait I just realized that it works in mental ray with XSI lights...but I'm using Arnold lights. Hmm. For some reason those don't work.

[caledonian_tartan]

SItoA supports ICE instanced lights. You simple have to set two attributes called ArnoldLightColor and ArnoldLightIntensity, and they will be automatically pushed as the value of the corresponding parameters of the Arnold lights.
Also you need to make the ICE attributes pass through a Log Value first. (Quoted)

arnoldlights.jpg

here's a compound with some more attributes for arnold lights.

Set Arnold Point Light Data.xsicompound

[sonictk]

Hi, I was also reading that support article but I still can't seem to get it to work...

This is my current scene:

http://i.imgur.com/vHB16c8.jpg

And the ICE tree for the point cloud object:

http://i.imgur.com/BJ1TGmU.jpg

I've tried changing the instance shape node from object/object+children as well, along with plugging in the compound as well, but no luck. I'm not that experienced with ICE; I still can't figure out what I'm doing wrong here. Would you mind explaining the process in a little more detail or taking a bigger screenshot of your ICE tree example? Sorry I'm still trying to learn bits of ICE here and there, so I'm not that familiar with all the different nodes etc.

EDIT: I tried making a simpler scene just as a test, but I still can't get it to work. If you had some time, would you mind taking a look at the ICE tree I did to see where I went wrong?

[xsisupport]

The solution is already shown above. Compare what you're doing with that.

[sonictk]

?? I kind of understand the ICE graph, but I realized what was happening previously...for some reason, I needed to Destroy the Scene every time I made a change or else the lights wouldn't appear.

Also, if I change the value of the light intensity or edit any arnoldLight parameter that I'm passing through ICE, I either need to resimulate or destroy the scene every time in order to get the lights to re-update...I still feel like I'm doing something wrong here?

http://i.imgur.com/J4h8ynd.jpg

I tried following the example as closely as possible...

[caledonian_tartan]

i fear destroying the scene when using this, is essential (atm)...

[sonictk]

Ah, ok. Thank you so much for the help! For a few hours I thought I had broken something...

[sonictk]

Hmm, I've been trying to rotate a set of spot lights that I instanced in ICE through Arnold...trying to use Set Particle Orientation didn't work, so I thought it was because of the spot_interest that I was supposed to move instead, so I tried passing arnoldLightLook_at through the ICE tree as well, which didn't work either. Is there something else I'm supposed to do first for it to work?