[Bf-funboard] Re: Fake Area-Lights

[GSR]

Hi,
public at konrad-haenel.de (2005-08-16 at 1037.30 +0000):
> It's not supposed to be very different, but I clearly see how it would 
> ease handling a lot. Try building 4 dupli-lights with about 12x12 lights 
> each (= 148 spots per light) and you get 576 spots in one scene. 
> Unfortunately, these are visible in the viewport and pretty much occlude 
> everything. Whith the proposed appraoch you'd have your usual 4 lights, 
> nice and clean. I can only recommend trying to setup an advanced 
> lighting-solution with dupliverted spotlights. It will quickly become 
> evident that these are not very practical. Fake-area-lights could make 
> the usage of shadow-buffered spotlight-clusters amazingly simple.

So how do you propose to show the settings of the 144 lights (!? *)?
You know, many "my spotlight sucks" are due to not viewing and then
adjusting the ranges to match the scene. In the case of planar source,
it could be the minimum of each setting (or the center subspot), but
in other cases like skydomes that is not useful as light are all over
the place pointing differently.

Even when only showing the minimum and allowing only planar kind, it
can look really "fun", think a big area light where the overlapping
area is small (button reporting 90 degress and the display barelly
showing 30) or inexistant, so the info of all light was rather useful
to check what was really going on. When not adjusting, I just used a
layer to hide the duplys, btw.

Also (the "*"), you do not need the same number of spotlamps than
samples*samples in arealight, as spotlight gives you softness by
definition (just tried samples 10 vs 5*5 spots to get a similar look,
with different progression for the shadow as main difference).

You have a bit more to do than saying "it would be cool to have spot
area lights", like fixing the issues derived from the limits of the
technique.

GSR