As an old Max user to Blender, I have waited for this for 8 years now.

Finally!!! I‘ve been waiting for this feature for yeeears! ❤️ perfect for product visualization!

I was waiting for this feature to come. I was very upset when the blender developers announced that they wouldn't bring it. I am very happy right now. Regardless of the topic, I'm curious about your opinion on a topic, what do you think about the light glow effect in blender. I think we should announce this to the developers.

3ds Max have this for decades. Thk God they put this in Blender. Very useful.

It's great to see light linking worked on, this is super useful. One comment tho, I feel like developers are putting more and more features dependent on outliner and collections, which as a concept seems the right thing to do, but in my experience this is starting to be confusing and cumbersome. Just a few examples. Collections are great to organise your scene, in fact, that is the main purpose of the outliner. Then, render layers where introduced and combined with the outliner, which means you have to think how to organise the scene, but also have the render layers you will need, which is kind of a compromise in some cases or you just have to render, do adjustments, then render again or have seperate scenes or files prepared. Also, the visibility of a collection can not be animated, because it was clashing with the functionality of linking. Now, to have lights affect particular objects, you have to make even more collections and think how to organise all other stuff around that. It's just too much and it''s too easy to make a mistake and also if changes are needed, restructuring the scene takes even more consideration. All of this could be solved if scene structure, render layers and light linking would be separate editors.

waiting for it for long time! i think it better to pick object in light list instead of put object in collection. sometimes we need to put objects in particular collection for example GROUND collection and putting again some objects in the new collection for light linking can complicate managing on objects

I can't believe THEY FINALLY ARE GOING TO ADD IT. That was a highly requested feature for so long. I'm so happy to see it's finally coming!

OMG! This is great! It's going to be so helpful for having eye lights on characters with any lighting set up!

Great news !!! Just missing the ligthgroup with enable passes (diff, gloss and co) by lightgroup and Cycles will be the same as production render like Arnold (oki, will missing LPE too but it's really specific). It's really great in the way they done it.

Finally, i have been waiting it for years.

thats crazy, it would be awesome to be able to use it on eevee

NO WAY! Am I dreaming. I didn't expect it this early. thank for the video 🧡

This is a massive improvement, thanks for the heads up

WOW.. I was soo missing this feature for like forever.. I do product visualizations and this is something that i been missing since switching to Blender years ago ❤❤

thank you for getting back to me.. it is in this and heres the thing, I didnt know it was the render/cycles that had to be changed in order to see it.... I am learnign Blender and as a noob.. you just helped me get past a hurdle.. in all the requests to understand not one person showed that render/cycles was the key to finding it except you in your video.. thank you so much.. now back to learning..!! :)

As a 3ds max/vray user, light linking was basically all I was doing when lighting a scene. just started blender, I think I got lucky!! :-)

Been waiting for this, finally the feature came🎉🎉

That's great news, Just recently I was thinking about switching to C4D just for this feature, tried C4D and is terribly slow. I'm so glad this is coming to blender.

Awesome!

Omg, I been search this few month ago for my work task, now is happen, thank you so much

Super Info. vielen Dank für das gute Video ! Es macht immer wieder Spaß die sehr gut erklärte Videos anzuschauen

Anyone have a guess what the chances eventually seeing this for EEVEE might be? Hope hope hope. So happy to see development happening for this feature, which is the primary one I miss from Maya. Let's also hope the clunky Collections method gets replaced somehow. Looks very cumbersome having to link objects and stuff. Also wondering if there will be Light-Centric and Object-Centric Light Linking. Anyway, super stoked about this!

Crazy, it took this long to have this.

Finally :D

Wow, powerful

And that’s the moment when Blender become actual production ready tool. Just wish we’d have ouliner as a nodes similar to katana or gaffer. That’d be complete game changer.

Yeeeeah🎉🎉🎉

Finally ❤❤❤❤

all 3d apps had this by default 15 years ago

Old Lightwave user, it was standard in LW...finally in Blender!

Just use the 'New' button to create a Light Linking Collection & 'DRAG' from the OUTLINER the meshes into the list of the new light linking collection. You won't see this collection in the outliner what creates less linked clutter in the outliner...

Taking a first look it seems to me the Shadow State setting is not working yet. The Exclude however is actually doing something. For example, I have a cube, a sphere and a plane as the floor, a blue and a red light. The cube is in a collection "blue", the sphere in a collection "red", the plane is in both. Now here comes the thing: as you showed in the video, if I set the sphere's and plane's Light State to "None" in "red", all objects receive the red light: the sphere, the plane and also the cube even though not being in this collection. Setting the sphere to "Include" now makes the sphere exclusively receiving the red light. The plane and cube stay dark. However, if you want cube and sphere to receive the red light but not the plane, you can leave the sphere at "None" and set the plane to "Exclude". So it seems, the "Include" setting makes an object the exclusive light receiver if the other objects are set to "None", "Exclude" or are not present in the collection. The "Exclude" setting makes an object not receive the light whereas others still receive it no matter if they are in the collection or not (except there is one set to "Include", which cuts off the light for non-collection objects). I guess the reason for this might be that you don't have to put all objects in specific collections for each light. By the way, when you linked the objects to the blue and red collection in your video, it is not necessary to take them out of the default collection. You can link objects to many collections even if they are placed in a specifc one (for reasons of model hierarchy or whatever). Anyway, these "None/Include/Exclude" states remind me a bit of audio mixing channels where you have a "Solo" and "Mute" button. "Mute" mutes the channel while all others still play if they are set to nothing else, "Solo" mutes all other channels no matter if muted or not and only plays the solo channels.

Previously you can only do something like this by separating each RGB lamps to distinguish what every light's unique function did in the shaders. This will make toon shading look amazing. Thank you, you always make how to's and tutorial easy to follow along.

Finally..!!!

finaly we can have a backlight without affecting the backdrop haha

3.5 just got realsed chill man XD

question, I am missing my light propperties so when I am in my light tab I can only see 'point sun spot etc' the rest is missing, Is this a bug or has it been moved in 3.5?

I just downloaded the 4.0 alpha version with Light Linking. The UI is very different, separating the Light Linking and Shadow Linking into two panels. Interesting . . .

Is light nodes removed in 3.5?

What can’t you just have all objects in a single collection? Since each light has the option to enable/disable linking of each object anyway?

It's not that convincing using Collections is logical, but it can cause to create a mess in the outliner, even for simpler scenes, where you may need small exclusion list but you don't want to clutter the outliner with nested collections or similar representations. I think light linking should feature alternative ways to handle light exclusion lists o more options for the user.

Honest to God thought this was an April fools joke! 😳😳😳😳

I've seen this in other software but have never found a reason to actually use it.

This could be useful for a blacklight effect with fluorescent glowing materials.

FINALLY! Been requesting this for years. But what I really need/want is for the assigned light to not show as a reflection on specified objects in the scene. When you do a flying logo and the light(s) shows as a hot spot on the object as it's traveling...not so good.

This reminds me of George Carlin "Here's an idea: a light bulb that only shines on things worth looking at."

I downloaded 4.0 and 4.1 alpha and beta.. and nad.. can't find it and there is no shading sub tab in object properties... I have tried everything and nada can't find the version you are using..

i thought that feature like it is easier to implement in eevee. Also it would be useful for NPR stuff

Does it have to be in cycles Render mode? I hope it's available in Eevee mode

At last 🙂

Over use of collections.. its time the divide that into groups and layers… its just impossible to get a scene order and still all the collections order. so messy. Wonder how it deals with objects in multiple collections

Finally. And do not explain why it took so long to wait for such a necessary function?

i think this is similar with the goo engine

so light linking gets launched with 3.6 onwards then!

is that working on blender 3.0?

oops i thought we already had this since 2.8

After soooo many years…. FINALLY.

If this is coming to 3.6 LTS finally there is really zero reason to NOT use Blender for everything except the work that is needed for simulations like in houdini. Since Brecht is working on Light Linking hopefully there is not so much back and foth for a final implementation.

I guess it is not valid for the Word light

I have been working in Blender for a very long time. This is interesting, however, past abstract I see no use... anyone have any ideas for this workflow?

There are some fatures they take far too long to impliment. This really should have been in years ago.

I guess that's a convenience but can't you do everything with cryptomatte and light groups already? :P Light groups won't exclude or include any objects in particular, but one can select for example Suzanne with the cryptomatte and set it so that only the "green light" light group will affect it. Then just do the same with another light group and add the results together with a mix node. Is there an instance where light linking is needed or is it just gonna make stuff easier and more convenient?

Pls don’t be an April fools joke 😅

Blender's UI and workflow still is super weird. Excluding/including objects from lights is a feature that has been in 3ds, Maya and other serious 3d apps for decades... Also calling it linking is wrong. Linking refers to acquiring attributes from a parent to a child node.

too bad, is not in eevee.

When this is implemented Blender will have 3 MAJOR MISSING features left: 1) Reflective Caustics 2) Nested dielectrics 3) Proper shadow/reflection catcher pass. Once all of it is implemented, there is literally no rival to Blender.