Lighting tips and tricks?

[anthony113]

Does anyone have any tips or tricks they can share for lighting in octane? I'm pretty used to manually moving spot and area lights around by hand in other programs and having the ability to direct light to very specific areas. I've watched a few of the demo videos and read through the manual but I can't seem to find a way to have this level of control inside of octane. Are there any power user videos out there on the subject of lighting inside of octane?

[saford91]

I would use emitter materials

[Sandrust]

You need go setup your lighting in your 3D application if you're going to use emitters in Octane.
Alternatively if you're using environment lighting you have a good deal of manipulation options within Octane.

[matej]

I'm pretty used to manually moving spot and area lights around by hand in other programs and having the ability to direct light to very specific areas.

The closest thing to this in Octane right now is using IES lights (texture emission node -> load .ies as floatimage) and tweaking the orientation parameter. You can't move the source yet, but you can direct it.

[anthony113]

So is there a way, currently, to say, bring in a simple object such as a sphere or plane and transform/scale it and use it as a light emitter in Octane? If not this would be a great feature to have. One step better would be for that geo to already exist within Octane.

[GeoPappas]

So is there a way, currently, to say, bring in a simple object such as a sphere or plane and transform/scale it and use it as a light emitter in Octane?

Yes, you Octane supports mesh emitters. But you can't transform/scale them in Octane (at this time). You need to do this in your modeling app.