Octane lighting question. Tweet

[Qtoken]

1) How can I create a spot-light effect in octane? can I import a spotlight from Blender and will Octane use it, or does it use it's own lighting?

At this time, one way to create a spotlight is by simply recessing a surface into a hollow cylinder and assigning that surface with a unique named material to be used as the light emission source in Octane. These physically modeled "spotlights" objects can then be duplicated within your scene as you require.
Within Octane, setting your spotlight's "light_source_surface material" to a Diffuse Material allows an emission value to be set to Texture Emission to control the color and intensity of your spotlight. If needed, you can make the spotlight invisible by simply setting the opacity to zero on all of it's materials, The now invisible spotlight will still emit light and will also cast shadows.

2) I have created 2 eyes for a robot that I would like to glow red, how can I achieve a glowing effect in Octane?

Same way as you setup the spotlights as above. Within Blender, assign a unique material to the areas of the eye that you want to glow. Within Octane, select that surface with the material picker and use a Diffuse material with an emission value to Texture Emission type. Set the color to your perfered shade of red and adjust the intensity to suit your scene.

[Qtoken]

I went back and tested some of that again, (making simple invisible spotlights) and noticed an strange result in pathtracing mode when the light source surface isn't yet also set to zero opacity.

With a diffuse material on all objects, and the spotlight's casing set to invisible, its still visible light source surface will light the whole room (a simple empty box) with an effect similar to firefles, lots of them, in a pattern similar to the the bare light source, but as noisy hotpixels.

Once the light emitting surface has also been hidden, Octane quickly delivers a 100% clean render with the expected spotlight.

This was from the 2.3 b5 .. I'll test this again later this week.

[radiance]

Hey,

Octane is a physically based engine and does'nt support traditional lightsources,
and as a lightsource is always visible in the real world, trying to hide it with alpha won't work. (the actual illumination will always be visible)

Radiance

[Qtoken]

Thanks for the reply,

The origional posts that I had been responding to in this thread have since disapeared. The user had been asking how to create unrealistic spotlights like those used by the more basic rendering engines found in apps like Blender

I agree that applying alpha on lighting objects isn't intended, but since I found that it was possible, in this version, to achieve a similar fake spotlight effect by using alpha to actually hide both the bulky spotlight and its lightsource from the camera's view.