Hey,vanlicht wrote:I second that suggestion. Currently it is very difficult to create dramatic lighting. I tried pre 2.3 to create a theatrical lighting setup, which spotlight effect is very hard to achieve. I eve create the barn doors for the light source, still the is not effective enough. Area light simply does not provide concentrated light source, comparing to a spotlight. In addtion I create someflat cubes with specularity and low roughness, in order to simulate bouncing light source... since we're talking about unbiased render here. Though, In this case there is simply no bouncing lights at all.
To conclude, i agree that something similar to spotlight is critically important feature to have. And hopefully with the upcoming update, the reflection issue is to be taken care of as well.
Adding non area lights to octane will probably make it 2x as slow.
'classic' cg lightsources are mathematically completely different than emitting geometry and introduce a large amount of additional code in the kernel that would simply outway the benefits vs speed.
During my 4 years on the luxrender project i've never seen anyone use a non area light in a nice render, every classic lightsource used just ruined the render of all realism.
Sorry, but there are ups and downs along the road to a complete GPU renderer, and many fallbacks and suprises.
Radiance