Area light to mimic native lights?

[james_conkle]

I’m a huge fan of the native and redshift area lights in Houdini. For example RS area light feels a lot more controlled with with their Intensity and Exposure sliders. Also it feels native being able to see an approximate light pattern in the hardware viewport.

Any tips on how I could make an HDA for Octane’s lights to have this functionality? I’ve started by adding a spotlight distribution node by default but I’m stuck on how I could achieve viewport feedback and photographic like exposure controls. Any advice would be appreciated!

Also, would you recommend I use a spectron light or the classic area light for this HDA?

[juanjgon]

I'm not sure if you are going to be able to create your own custom HDA lights, probably not, because the plugin only extracts as Octane lights the HDAs with the operator types available in the plugin HDAs. Let me think about adding these features, although something like the exposure parameter is going to need to be scripted because the Octane lights don't have this parameter.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[james_conkle]

Thanks for the reply Juanjo! I appreciate your time on this even though it could be considered an odd request. Some of this is me just getting used to the plugin. I've recently been happy using the "Light Color" set to a value that allows me to set my "Power" to ~50,000 (half way on the slider) this allows for easier fine tuned control compared to if the slider was set to ~500.