More lightsources in evee
It is simple: currently we can create only 128 light sources in evee. I would like it to be more. I am using blender for Architecture visualisations and sometimes I have quite lightconsuming scenes like one below. I've excedeed 128 light limit with this composition and I am not able to create any more lights in the scene. I know that there are propably some technical reasons behind this but maybe with new generation of graphic cards it will be possible.
11 Comments
I agree with your suggestion, Blender should have an option in preferences to exceed such limit. in between you can use mesh lights.
Well don't you think this limitation is here for a reason? I doubt the devs just decided to have that for fun.
Do you mean using emissive materials? The problem with them is that in Eevee they don't cast shadows.
I strongly support this request!
It would be nice if it would be possible but for now I must use workarounds like light baking. I thinkg that other usefull option would be to have texture lights in evee
I dont think such complex lighting will be handled by any realtime render, also require great GPU.
These limitations would be due to the fact that Eevee is a real time renderer, it's likely the maximum number of lights they could pack into the shaders used for rendering images. There are probably different ways of coding Eevee to handle a theoretically unlimited number of lights, but they would probably make Eevee slower as a result, or less accurate, etc.
One thing you could do though, is apply some logic to the problem to solve it with as a simple matter of addition.
Light is additive, to have more lights than the limit imposed by Eevee by default, you would simply need to render two view layers of the scene, one with one group of lights enabled, and another with a different set of lights enabled, then literally 'add' the two images together, which would double your limit limit.
You could keep going with this technique to add as many limits as you like. With 4 view layers you could have 512 lights. With 8 you could have 1024. It would take longer to render but that's the cost of more lights.
Only limitation of this technique is that you would not be able to view 'all' lights at the same time in the viewport in real time.
* @ Grady * Also, if the goal is only to have what we see in the example provided here, a simple bake can be done to get the pattern on the wall, then replace the many lights by one big area light to keep lighting stuff around.
It's a real time renderer after all, gotta work with it the same way you work with a video game, keep things simple and cost efficient.
Due to the technical limitations, like limited processing power, the extra lights might have to be faked somehow. Maybe the lights in the distance could be baked? This would make reflections look unrealistic after moving the camera, so the light map bakes could be updated at like 1 fps with frame blending or just not updated at all for optimal performance. I don't know. Or maybe they could have an option to just remove the limit and add more lights, so super powerful computers could take advantage of their hardware.
I didn't know Eevee had this Light Limitation until now.
Does Cycles have Light Limitation too?
* @eonneon * And that's not the only limitation for Eevee, see Eevee limitation (although it seems out of date for some points).
I don't know for Cycles, but there must be limitations too. I can't see how there couldn't be, softwares are always limited in one way or another.