[Bf-funboard] Re: Fake Area-Lights

[Campbell Barton]

I made an onrender scriptlink to turn any lamp with "area" in the name 
into a fake arealight.
Its cleans up after its self and the user never sees the extra objects

http://members.iinet.net.au/~cpbarton/ideasman/




>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
> 
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>
>  
>


-- 
Campbell J Barton

133 Hope Street
Geelong West, Victoria 3218 Australia

URL:    http://www.metavr.com
e-mail: cbarton at metavr.com
phone: AU (03) 5229 0241