OTOY Forums

Will Octane ever have spot lights taht we can controll a bit more, ive been playing around with IES lights and they drive me nuts trying to use them as main lights like a spot light, to light up a small area vs an entire room. Doing reading on IES it seems they are not used, by other render engines, as a main source of light. Useing emitter mesh planes or point mesh emitter lights lights up a indoor scene too much most of the time, really hard to get controll of lights esp indoor lighting unless im out door rendering.

Thanks

A physically accurate renderer does not really work with lighting which produce light from nothing - there has to be something there to emitter the light so that the light emitter itself plays a part in the lighting, reflections, etc in the scene. It IES lights are not doing it for you, use the Create Emitters from Lights script (and there is another script to just create an emitter from the currently selected light) - and the resulting geometry should be facing in the direction of the spot light, so all you need to do is set the emission power. If you really don't want to see the emitter geometry in the rendered scene - turn it's opacity to 0.

Paul

I was thinking. If one creates a 3d object in the shape of a spotlight. With reflective angles and a centre point that acts like a bulp that you can make the emitter. Would it act as a real light would since its a physically acurate render. Ever creating something as simple as half a cube.. making it reflective and placing it around the emitter... would you have the directed spotlight effect?... not home yet to try it... but wil when Im back

I was thinking. If one creates a 3d object in the shape of a spotlight. With reflective angles and a centre point that acts like a bulp that you can make the emitter. Would it act as a real light would since its a physically acurate render. Ever creating something as simple as half a cube.. making it reflective and placing it around the emitter... would you have the directed spotlight effect?... not home yet to try it... but wil when Im back

I've tried this - and it works if you have enough render power (which I don't). In my expoerience, IES lights give a better result and render faster.

Paul