Somethings not normal here

[daniel-brakke]

Alright, so Im doing a fairly large project, currently with some 50 lights. But for some reason, these last few that Im working with, with all others hidden to ease render time, dont act as if they have shadows on. I, ofcourse, use mental ray. Even if I copy a light that is working fine, the copy doesnt seem to be blocked by normals. Yes, I have checked the normals on my objects, and have found no problems.
I'm primarily using point lights, and I have Real Sun/sky turned on.

[joojaa]

And the objects themselves arent chekked as not taking part in raytracing?

[daniel-brakke]

What do you mean? Like I said, it works for all other lights in my scene, just when I copy a light and move it to the desired location, hide all others, and render the scene, the shadows arent right.

[joojaa]

Copy is not a catch all eettings operation. It doesnt copy the linker and connections unless you explicitly tell it to do so. So it doent actually copy connections just the sat values. Connections being far more important than the rest

[daniel-brakke]

Even so, if I create a new point light and move it to the desired location, turn on shadows, it still doesnt work

[joojaa]

Yes, that can happen if theres shadow linking going on. Again the linker is not what you copied and the LINKER is the king of the land.

Theres a second possible reason, if you set your copy operation to INSTANCE then lights woent work out either becase light instances arent well defined in renderers.

In any case ist not pssoible to solve this problem for you beyiond thsi information. as you jsut describe what you think ought to work and i know for a fact that in many cases it ought not to work. Buit the  situation is just muvch more complex than what you describe and i can not peer beyond the filters your capable of explaining. So if you odnt understand something then I can not see the symptom because you cant describe the problem. And no Normals dont have anything to do with how shadows work.

[daniel-brakke]

Ok, if Im not explaining it right, then I'll put up a picture. A picture's worth a thousand words, as they say.

In this shot, the lighting is at the very top of the central structure, and as you can see, its very dim. However, doors and windows are far brighter.

And, By the way, I still get this effect when I create new lights and move them, as I said before. Copied lights are not the only ones creating this effect

[daniel-brakke]

I played with the light linking setting (On, Obey light Linking, Off), but none fixed the problem. I suppose I will have to redo all of my lighting, and hope that fixes the issue

[joojaa]

looks like a exposure problem actually. What are the shaders like and do you have a exposure controlol attached to the camera.

[rls76]

Are you using an MiB Blackbody node

[daniel-brakke]

@Joojaa: My shaders are default assigned to the texture types (Lambert, blinn, etc), and no exposure control. I dont usually change anything about the camera.

@Russell: No. I have no idea what that is