How to turn off light sources with self-illuminating material assigned to them?

[Anonymous]

I render an exterior scene in daylight with lights turned off, however the light sources have been set to a self-illuminated material and appear as the lights are on, as shown in the image.

I don't want to have to change the material of the light source just for one render, besides there are lots of different types of light sources with different self-illuminating materials assigned to them.

How can I adjust this to make the self-illumating material vanish, so that the lighting fixtures will show as powered off in the daylight render?

[rudi.roux · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

The problem lies with the material itself, being self-illuminating. The material is available to be used for obvious reasons, but with daylight renders it is a problem as you noticed. 

Unfortunately, even if you turn off the dimming of the light in the Artificial Lights Rendering Dialog Box, the material will still self-illuminate. 

What you could do is the following: 

• Duplicate the family, by the look of things you're using a "Wall-Mount Round Bulkhead" family which has a self-illuminating material assigned to it. 
• Go into your family editor and assign a glass material to it. (Change the reflectance/glazing of the material as you desire).
• Save and load the family into your project. 
• "Select all Instances" in you project and change it to the modified Bulkhead. 
• Render you Scene and then change the bulkheads back. 

OR Either set that material to an instance parameter or set it as a type parameter and make two types... Either way, you will have to flip the family before each rendering...

I know you didn't want to change the materials, but this would be the easiest and quickest way of doing things to achieve your end result. (As far as I know - as there have been quite a few similar questions over the years, all with similar advice as mentioned above).

I hope this helps!