- [Instructor] Once you have a few lights in your scene,
you can speed up your workflow using a window called
the Light Explorer.
This is a version of the Scene Explorer
with particular settings to display only lights
and their most important parameters.
Now, unfortunately, the Scene Explorer generally
does not play well with active shade.
This applies to all of the Scene Explorer variations
such as the Layer Explorer and the Light Explorer.
If active shade is running
the Scene Explorer does not update.
So effectively we can't use them at the same time.
Additionally, if you open up the Light Explorer
while active shade is running,
it will not actually display just the light,
it'll display everything in your scene.
So we can't use the active shade window
in conjunction with a Light Explorer.
We have to use the view port
to preview the effects of any changes.
So I've set my view port up with a high quality user preset.
That's going to be a close approximation
of the final rendering.
It just doesn't have any global illumination.
So there's no bounce light and no proper reflections.
But we can check this against
an active shade rendering to see
if it's close enough for our purposes.
So I'll go ahead and launch an Active Shade Render,
give that a moment to warm up.
And we can see that aside from the fact that
the ceiling in our view port
is black because there's no bounce light.
And we don't see any reflections on the floor.
It's more or less the same as the Active Shade rendering.
Okay, I'll close that.
And let's open up the Light Explorer.
It's found in the tools menu,
under Al Global Explorers,
Light Explorer.
And let's expand this window a little bit.
We have a bunch of columns here.
Not all of these are necessarily relevant.
A bunch of these are kind of legacy
and don't apply to a current workflow.
We've got things like the Shadow Sample Range
and the Shadow Map Size.
Well, frankly, no one uses bitmap shadows anymore.
It's all Ray Trace Shadows.
So that stuff doesn't even apply.
The only things we really care about here
are whether the light is on or off,
and we can turn the check box on or off here.
All the lights in my scene are actually instances.
So when I turn one of them on or off,
they all turn on and off.
We also have whether shadows are on or off
we can turn that, on and off.
And then we have the Light Intensity.
Let's bring this column over,
'cause that's really important.
I'll click on that Light Intensity column,
and just drag it over,
drop it right to the left of the Shadow Type,
just right to the right of the shadow on.
And the rest of this stuff really doesn't matter.
We don't care.
These are really the only things we care about
whether the light is on,
whether it has shadows
and its intensity, which is in Candelas.
So if I wanted a rounder number here
I could just type in a value of 1000.
I need to highlight those numbers explicitly
and type in a value of 1000 Candelas,
and now they've all changed.
And it was just a slight change
so we didn't really see anything happen in our view port.
Okay. So that's the Light Explorer.
It's very handy when you have a scene
with more than just a few lights.