Question Lights and performance

[brasileirinho]

Are lights CPU or GPU bound? Do you guys know any good tradeoff between light quality and performance? Or any plugin to improve light performance?

 

[Damarmau]

Lights are GPU bound. Usually you want to use spot lights vs point lights when possible. Anymore than 3 crossing beams and performance will typically go down. For animations you usually want to use as few lights as possible, 3 usually being the minimum required for things to look good. I've had as many as 20+ lights in a scene for making images but performance is terrible at that point.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

If you have a lot of lights, go to each light in the scene and switch them back and forth between Auto and ForcePixel. If there's little to no difference, leave that one on Auto. If it makes a difference, set it to ForcePixel. Sometimes you get funny effects where the light switches itself back and forth as you move around in the scene. If that happens, set it to ForceVertex, or ForcePixel and leave it.