Is there a way to maintain instance behaviour of lights? For example if I have a bunch of lights which are instances of “large light”, can I change the brightness of all of them at once by changing the brightness of “large light”?
Currently it’s not possible for inputs other than SketchUp. However, I think we could recognize light instances based on some special information for Shapespark included in light names. For example, if your have 4 large lights in your 3D modelling tool named:
{LargeLight}
{LargeLight}.002
{LargeLight}.003
{LargeLight}.004
then during import we could recognize all of them as 4 instances of a single light named LargeLight.
The FBX light strength is ignored because this property is incompatible among different rendering engines. However, the ability to recognize light instances on FBX import would allow to set the strength in the editor for all instances of a light at once, which would hopefully help in your case.
Starting from version 1.7.3 Shapespark allows to import multiple lights from a 3D file (eg. FBX, DAE) as instances of a single Shapespark light.
If an imported light name starts from __NAME__ (any NAME preceded and succeeded by double underscores) it is imported as an instance of a Shapespark light named NAME. So, if in your 3D modelling tool you name your lights as:
__DeskLamp__
__DeskLamp__.001
__DeskLamp__.002
they will be imported to Shapespark as 3 instances of a light named DeskLamp.
Lights imported as instances of a single Shapespark light must be of the same type, so that Shapespark could determine a common type for all the instances. For example, if the model comes from 3ds Max and the first one (__DeskLamp__) is an Omni Standard light, the two other lights must also be Omni Standard lights.
Do I understand correctly that you would like to give the same Shapespark name to multiple 3ds Max objects, and then to be able to configure settings like Custom lightmap resolution, Custom hide in views for all of them at once?
OK - is there a more complete list somewhere? I looked at the bullet list on the Announcement thread and looked at the we site but did not find any additional info. Maybe I just misunderstood what you were responding to.
OK. Here’s the detailed explanation of the feature I was discussing with @tim about.
Starting from version 1.7.6 Shapespark allows to force importing multiple objects from a 3D file (eg. FBX, DAE) as instances of a single Shapespark object type.
If an imported object name starts from __NAME__ (any NAME preceded and succeeded by double underscores) it is imported as an instance of an object type named NAME . So, if in your 3D modelling tool you name the objects as:
__Chair__
__Chair__.001
__Chair__.002
they will be imported to Shapespark as 3 instances of an object type Chair.
This helps for import workflows which doesn’t support object instancing via the 3D file itself by allowing to pass instancing information in object names.
Dots are not required in this naming scheme. On Shapespark import __test__1 and __test__2 should be recognized as two instances of light named test. Have you tried it and found it not to work?