So far i have been loving embergen! It has increased my workflow speed by so much. A simulation that would have taken a week in something like houdini or fumefx can be done in a few hours! I dont know what i ever did without it.
I have been putting the software through its paces and i have some ideas to further improve its features. My first idea is a custom light rig exporter. I noticed that the options to export lighting setups is a bit limited. You can export the smoke channel which can have multiple lights baked in, or the 6 point light rigs. However i noticed the 6 point light rigs are limited with their settings. If i could export custom lighting with the smoke channel i could overcome all these issues.
My thoughts were to make a new export option called custom light rig. It would function the same as the smoke export channel, however in the export section where there would normally be the red/green/blue/luminance option, each channel would have a dropdown menu. When you click the dropdown menu for a channel, a list of all the existing lights in the scene (direct and ambient) would pop up and you could select a different light per channel. This would allow for much more flexible light rig exports. You could have multiple custom exporters to output as many lights as you want. Since it is essentially a clone of the smoke export, it would also respect the other settings that affect the smoke channel such as smoke color and ambient occlusion. The would offer a finer level of control than simply relying on the 6 point light rig. Another benefit is it would be affected by the render styles such as kuwahara or pixelization, something the 6 point light rig cant do at the moment. Here is a quick mockup of my idea.
Thanks again, i hope we can further improve this awesome tool!