Can anyone confirm that when a Particle Emitter or a Replicator use a bulb or spotlight as the replicated object that the light spherelight cone are not replicated?

With a replicator, you can get round this using the "Create" function, but I haven't found a "bake particles" function that might do the same for a particle emitter. 

Thanks
Richard

Yes, I can confirm that the light-sphere does not appear on replicated bulbs.

It seems that the replicator doesn't actually replicate the object, but a reference to the object.  I've noticed that replicated objects also don't render with an outline when using the Toon!Pro plug-in, and have concluded that it must be due to the fact that there's no actual geometry with the replicator.  (That makes sense from a system-resource-management perspective.)  The "Create" function even cautions you about the resource allocations necessary to create real instances of each object.

I haven't played around with particles enough to know the answer to your question about particles, but I'd guess it's a similar process "under the hood" of Carrara to produce particles and surface replications.

Hope that's helpful.

• Dex

Yes that would make sense - the object reference is being replicated and not the object, but I wonder why this includes some features e.g. incident light, and not visible or volumetric light.

Have also noticed that replicated objects are not processed by ToonPro or WireframePro, although the built-in Toon Part III DOES catch them!

Curioser and curiouser!

Thanks
R

Eric might want to weigh in here, but I think that Toon III catches these objects because it's a post-render effect, whereas Toon!Pro seems to be one that works kind of during the render.  I'm no programmer or expert, but Toon!Pro affects each render square, whereas Toon III does its thing at the end of the render.

And if Eric does weigh in on this, maybe getting Toon!Pro (and Wireframe Pro, apparently) to recognize replicated objects would be a good thing to think about?  For most of my situations I've been able to just create instances, but it does load up on the geometry in a scene!

Thanks!
Dex