Didge

Hi Grant, Many thanks for the suggestion ... Yes, I did think of that - but :- 1. Turning ambient light off didn't change the rendering very much because its set to a very low 5%; 2. I'd expect the ambient light setting to have the same effect (more or less) regardless of which shader is used. Another few clues ... 1. If I turn all off all the interior lights, then the view is the same whether the 'Limit Shader render mode to 8 lights' setting is on or off. This is the expected behaviour. 2. With 'Limit Shader render mode to 8 lights' turned ON, successively enabling each interior light has almost no impact on ambient lighting. You just get the tracing of the interior lights, occluded by walls etc. Again, this is the expected behaviour. This is what you see in image #1 above. 3. BUT - with the 'Limit Shader render mode to 8 lights' setting turned OFF, successively enabling each interior light progressively increases the ambient lighting. You still get the tracing of the interior lights, occluded by walls etc, but the effect is swamped by the ambient lighting. This is not the expected behaviour. This is what you see in image #2 above. 4. This is the clincher !! Next, I turned all the interior lights OFF, then added interior lights one at a time ... Lighting was correct for the first 6 lights - that is, all the interior lighting was as expected, with traces to the outside occluded by walls - see image #1 below. BUT - when I turn on the 7th light, the entire exterior lights up ! See image #2 below. This always happens when the 7th light is turned on, regardless of which other lights are turned on, or the order in which they are enabled. IMHO - this has to be a bug in the renderer and the 'Limit Shader render mode to 8 lights' setting ?!?!?

Hi Pat, Thanks again for your speedy feedback ... and the helpful tip - all my lighting objects come on now - great ! There does seem to be an unexpected behaviour with that setting though (Renderworks is OK) ... If the 'Limit Shader render mode to 8 lights' is enabled, then the shader behaves as expected - only 8 lights come on, and light is occluded by solid objects such as walls. So when I enable my interior lights with the heliodon switched off (ie a night scene), the scene looks like image #1 attached. If the 'Limit Shader render mode to 8 lights' is disabled, then all the interior lights come on (great) but the exterior space lights up as thought it is daylight. See image #2 attached. Switching to the RW shader gives the expected result - see Image #3 attached. Is this just something strange with the OpenGL shader - or is there another setting I need to adjust ? Many thanks for your advice, Gary

Hi Pat, Thanks very much for your super-speedy reply 🙂 Ah - I knew it would be something simple - it works !! Thanks so much for your tip. BTW - Im using VW 2023 SP8 on an M1 Mac - cant see any setting there to enable more than 8 lights in Shaded mode ?

Hi, I'm fairly new to VectorWorks, so I hope someone can help me with this - I've been researching for hours and just can't work it out ... I've added interior lighting to a house design. After discovering that the 'Shaded' render mode only supports 8 lighting objects (that took a couple of hours to work out), I switched to RenderWorks so all the lighting objects can be enabled at the same time. The lighting works fine - that is, all the interior spaces are illuminated as expected - but after the render finishes, the lighting objects appear as bright spheres, or sometimes as ghostly outlines in the final render - see the images attached. All the lights are 'point' sources, with their class defined as 'light source' with 'fill' and 'pen' set to 'None'. How can I prevent the lighting objects themselves appearing in the final render ? Many thanks 🙂