Indigo Renderer Forum

Hi, I have not been using indigo for too long, but so far I'm getting through everything alright.
I have a question about the way light materials work, and how they are rendered.

I've been tying to render a scene with multiple lights with Skindigo, and it seems that light samples compensate each other.

Let me explain.

When I make a light source using one of the presets (power 100 efficacy 17), and render the scene (even a simple scene) with the skylight and the sun light on. When I toggle the lights on and off, I find that the samples for the sun and skylight are good, but the samples for my light source are almost non existent. when I turn off the sun and sky, there is not too many samples (obviously the longer I let it render the more samples I have, but compared to the other light sources it's a pretty shitty amount of samples)

When I do the opposite though, and make the light source very bright (maybe a bit ridiculous) power 100000 efficacy 100 or viceversa power 100 efficacy 100000, and render it, it gives me a good amount of samples on the lightsource, but the amount of samples on the sun, and skylight, decrease.
The whole scene becomes darker, except when I turn off the ridiculously "bright" lightsource

Anywhoo... I'm just trying to figure out why this happens, and see if there is any way I can increase the samples on both, instead of dividing the samples between my light sources.
When I decrease or increase the brightness of a lightsource, I would like it to do just that, increase and decrease the brightness of the lightsource, instead of increase or decrease samples.

I hope that wasn't too confusing. Please let me know if I need to clarify some more

As far as I understand, Indigo samples lightsources accordingly to their power. That means that if you don't touch your light layers, it should sample each light source according to how much illumination it contributes to the scene. The problem with that, though, is when you want to screw around with your light layer settings or isolate certain ones. It doesn't adapt during rendering, it just keeps sampling them based on initial powers.

It'd be great if it didn't sample light layers that were turned off. This way you could really make Indigo work on layers that are less efficient/take longer to render instead of refining layers that are already noise free.

so then maybe it's more "efficient" to render one light at a time, and mix them all later in photoshop?

this would be the exact same thing as messing with the light layers, except that indigo is not sampling all lights at the same time (bright and soft, layers that need refining and layers that don't) instead it samples one light layer, until you find it fit, and then you can let layers that take more time go longer, and layers that don't are not rendering while the layers that take longer render.

Is that just about right?

-Javier