Making objects to not be effeted by lights.
 

NOTE - this used to be a topic for fog lights, but I figured the problem out myself. To save space, I'm just going to use this thread for my next question.

I have a poly plane with a landscape image as the background for a scene. I have multiple directional lights positioned around a castle to iluminate it as well. The castle is lite perfectly, but the problem is that the landscape image is too bright. Is there any way to make the poly plane be only effected by one light or any tricks to make it darker?

If you choose the poly plane you can go to Window/Relationship Editors/Light Linking/Object Centric and unlink lights from your poly plane, they will no longer affect the background. To do this simply click on the lights you don't want to affect the plane. I would approach it one of two ways, either unlink all lights from the ply plane, create a new one just for the plane and unlink it from your castle.....or create an imageplane from your camera and use your background picture there under Environment in the Attribute Editor. The imageplane will not be affected by those lights...you adjust the brightness right in the imageplane's attributes.

In the Light Linking window, lights affecting an object are grey-lined, lights that don't affect an object are clear. Once you click on an object or light you make the change in your scene, you don't need to hit enter :)

Darkon

Thank you very much, Darkon. I actually changed all the lighting from four dir. lights to one ambiant light and everything was lite perfectly. I really hadn't paid much attention to what each light was specifically used for up until now. Never-the-less, I now know how to use the Relationship Editor. Thanks.

One method would be to unlink all lights from the plane (optional) and then map the file texture's color to the material's color and incandescence (how the hell does one pronounce that? :))

Correction to previous: Don't map the file to the color. Map it only to the incandescence and set the color black.

or you could use a different type of light, like point light from a distance for the sun