Quick question about lighting options

[JamesCG]

Good afternoon all,

First, let me say that I'm excited about what I've seen so far and have been looking for an affordable unbiased render to explore.

Now, one thing that I do often in my visualization work is simulate theatrical lighting. Coming from mental ray this is usually done via a spotlight with a beam width and controlling the falloff so that I can have either a sharp edge or soft edge to the light. Most theatrical lighting requires spots, gobos (metal inserts used to cast shadows from lights) and gels to color lights. I am curious about the possibilities with Octane to accomplish this.

Overall there have been two options in the past and I've found that neither work very well.

1) Model the lights themselves, complete with housing, lamp, shutters, lenses, etc in an attempt to get an usable theatrical light. This becomes less practical when you need 40-100 lights and is very time consuming.

2) Use an IES file (if available). The downside here is that you usually have no control over beam angle or shadow edge sharpness.

I understand that theatrical lighting is not generally a focus for render engines but I thought I'd ask while I'm downloading the demo.

Looking forward to any comments folks might have,

JamesCG

[radiance]

Hi,

Our current 2.2 only supports environment lightsources (and sunlight), so i think it might be best for you to wait until the next 2.3 is out,
which will have area lights.

Radiance