General Lighting Question

DDCreate

I have an enviroment that has 6 overhead flourescent lights set up in the scene. I attached a spot light to each and now my renders take forever in 3Delight. Is it because i have too much light going on for the engine to handle?

nonesuch00

Yes, although in DAZ I just do the simplest of renders, I know from Unity for each set of lights you create a new set of shadows, reflections, and all types of 'physics'-y things and then your light calculations and renders take very, very long. It's sort of like having your scene open several times at once while the light values re-caluclated and merged into the final scene. There is some optimization and simplification otherwise it could not be even attempted but that's the jist of it.

In Unity I usually try to use 1 ambient light source, eg the Sun or Moon, and then sparingly add other light sources on an as needed basis: eg campfire, torch, porch light. Indoor scenes usually also usually have one overhead ambient light in a room and sometimes a lamp or two. 

Of course in commercial and government building long hallways, big rooms and so on will have lights from multiple sources but I usually model that as ambient light too because that's what it seems to be for people otherwise they wouldn't use those as light sources.

Now for things like night and dark time scenes like state fairs, carnivals, stage productions, dramatic lighting and such somebody else should chime in but I'd try and fake those lights postproduction using selective contrast and blurring. Although you could slowly build up the scene until your GPU or DAZ said no more please.