Hello Tdesigners
Is it possible to drop more then one geometry/lights in one time in the the Render Top.
Ive got for example 10 lights that ive to link in one Render-top.
Right now I do it manual but it would be nice to make it easyer. 
I know that it is possible to type more lights in the Render top but whit more than 7 light TD is crashing 
not sure if this is still valid, but 8 lights used to be the max opengl can handle. As a solution you would have to use deferred shading (i think malcolm posted an example a few years ago)
Ive look ad the the deffered shading techniques. Interesting.
I was thinking to use a Renderpass-Top for every lightcomp. Is that a good idea ore is it to heavy to render it realtime.I think I use a 50 lightcomps as max. In the hard shadow mode.
The maximum number of lights has been greatly increased in 088.
Can you post the crash you are getting when trying to use 7+ lights?
I Will send you een crash file tomorrow. What is the limit off lightcomps inTD88 right now
There isn’t a hard limit, it depends on your GPU hardware, and what else is being done in the shader. It should be many 10s or even a few 100 in theory (although it would run slow)
Is there a trick to bring for example 50 lightcomps to a render-top? I was thinking to use a renderpas for every lightcomp and mix every render-pass together whit a composite-top.
That will be much slower than using a single Render TOP. You should reference all your lights using pattern matching (e.g, light*) in the Light parameter to use them all in a single render.
OK.
Is there a way to patching light-comps from different containers. Right now ive created a Moving-light geometry whit inside the geometry a lightcomp. Ive I patching more then 8 light-comps from different containers TD is crashing.
You can just use relative paths
geo1/light* geo2/light*The crash is just a bug, and not related to how you should work, since it shouldn’t crash.
Oke, so there is no limit for using relative patches. 
Definitely not by design, the bug you have being something else. It should be quick to fix if you can post an example.
Ok here is a testfile.
Ive create a Table-Dat to write all the relative patches in on time. And linked these table-dat to the render-top.
As you can see the last 2 fixtures are not ok. The light comp is inside the fixture geometry. So ive I change the pan/tilt parameter the spot is moving including the lightcomp.
Idea is to link these spots whit DMX
Ive there is another technique to greate these effect (volumetric Light) please let me know. 
Ive got a presentation next week to use these technique in a big show 
Test Light Comp.zip (1.98 MB)
Interesting, I don’t see that issue on my computer. Can you tell me what your GPU and driver version is. This is likely a driver bug.
How do I make the crash happen?
Ok Here the specs.
When I copy for example 7 lights extra in the Fixture Container and write te relative patch link in the DAT-Table TD crash.
Another thing you see in the picture. Everything is ok till a 7 fixtures. When I put one extra number 7 and 8 are not ok. Delete number 8 and 7 works fine.
Ive try the same TD file on another computer and that gives the same crash.
Catalyst version 13.4
Ati Readeon HD5700
Test Light Comp Mac pro bootcamp.zip (3.11 MB)
Ok, some news for this. To avoid the crash can you try setting the windows environment variable
TOUCH_SINGLE_THREAD_SWAP=1. I get a crash that this env var fixes, but it just randomly occurs after using TD for a while, not due to using more lights.
For the lighting issue, what we are running into here is a limit on the number of textures that can be used at once. On my AMD card this is 16. Each light can use up extra textures for each feature it uses. A default point light won’t uses up any textures, so you can have many of those in a file. However:
If you have shadow on, it uses 1.
If it’s a cone light, it uses another 1.
If it has a projection map, it uses another 1.
If you are using other texturing like a color map or a specular map in your Phong MAT, that will also use up more.
So to get around this limitation yes you will need to split your render into a few different passes, but not 1 per pass. You should be able to do 4-6 lights per pass if you aren’t using textures for other things in your MAT.
I’ll look into making it more clear when this case occurs so it can be avoided.
Hi Malcolm,
Thanks for these very imported information.
You talking about using textures in the Phong-Mat.
Do you mean all used phong-mats renderd the render top?
And did I count All the phongs used in All the geometry in à render top together.
Ore did you mean just the phong-mat in the light Comp.?
The texture limit is per render operation. That is when you render a SOP you have your Phong MAT and all its textures (if any) and all the lights which may also be using textures. Those what are account for your texture usage, plus a few extra internal ones like one that is used for Dithering in the Render TOP. So you don’t add up multiple Phong MATs or anything like that, you just look at it on a per rendered SOP basis.