VW Architect Lights help and explanation

[MGuilfoile]

I've always been confused by VW's lights and I can't seem to find any good information about how to use them. When I do a search, I get all sorts of material specific to Spotlight. I need to know how to use them to light a room or an object with Architect's lighting tools. I'd like to know how (or if) the lights can be controlled better than I'm doing now.

 

I'm posting four images here to help explain what I'm looking for. They all have the same name with the exception of an "01," "02," and so on suffix. Image 01 shows the Info Palette when I've selected a spotlight. I know I can set the beam and the falloff spread by adjusting the four line segments in the "Spread" window, but what does the location of the little circles that represent the handles do? As you can see in images 01 and 02, the beam and spread are almost identical. The little circles, however, are in different places. What does that control, if anything? The other two images, 03 and 04, show examples of the "Point to" arrow. In both images, the arrows are pointing to the same location, but one is longer than the other. I used to think that the length of the arrow determined the falloff distance...from 100% to zero...but that doesn't seem to be correct. In fact, I could see no difference at all with differing lengths of the "Look to" arrow. I did, however, notice that it is nearly impossible to control. When adjusting it by dragging, instead of following the beam back to the source, it randomly moves in the direction perpendicular to the screen. It should not do this. It should follow directly to the light source. In my images attached here, you can see how this has happened by the shape of the light icon. It has clearly turned away. In general, it is pretty hard to control...which is fine if it doesn't really matter how long the arrow is. But is seems to me it should do something. And why can't I set the length of the arrow in the Info Palette? I should be able to.

 

Lastly, some general questions. Why is there a "smooth" and "realistic" setting. I assume "realistic" means it follows the inverse square law, but that is pretty smooth. So what kind of smooth is "smooth" and how can I adjust it? Can I adjust it? I remember using Strata3D to render Vectorworks models. Strata's lights were easy to control, with two concentric circles around the light to control the beam and spread. Then it had something like VW's "Look to" arrow, but it could actually be pointed at something and it's two handles controlled the distance for the light falloff. I think a lot of people here will know what I'm talking about. It was pretty simple to use, I think.

 

In short, VW lighting takes me forever and I can't help but think I'm doing it wrong. For some reason, however, I can't find a single tutorial on how to do it right (with the exception of Spotlight tutorials which are far more sophisticated than what I need or trivial YouTube presentations that basically just say "use lights to illuminate your scene." I know that already. Can anyone shed some light--ha ha--on this? I think it would help a lot of people. I'm really hoping that VW will put some effort into making the lighting more user friendly. Now that the rendering engine is so much better, we really need lights that are not so cumbersome. Any advice?

 

Thanks,

MHBrown

 

[Andy Broomell]

I think most of your hunches are correct. The precise positions of the little handles in the OIP beam angle widget don't mean anything, they're just a way to interactively adjust the Spread & Beam fields, which are the only two values which have an affect.

 

"Smooth" & "Realistic" falloff are just names that someone came up with, sort of like presets. I'm sure each correlates to some underlying value that we don't have direct control of, but regardless, all three options are just varying "amounts" of falloff.

 

The "look to" handle on the Light object itself doesn't control anything other than the general direction of the light.

 

I too have issues with adjusting Lights directly in the drawing window.  The interface for working with Lights is indeed generally awful and antiquated. As far as I recall, Lights haven't been touched or improved in my 15 years of using Vectorworks.  The rendering output is fine, but it's a pain to get them set up since we're dealing with an ancient GUI.

 

 

Edited December 15, 2022 by Andy Broomell

[MGuilfoile]

Hmmm...that's unfortunate. I'm puzzled that VW would go to all the trouble to integrate the Cinema4D rendering engine, but not improve all the tools that are required to make it work. It's like building a great car, but not supplying tires, a gas tank (or battery), and transmission. Someone needs to tell VW to stop adding nonsense "features" that nibble around the edges of their software improvements and start looking at the fundamentals that take it from a CAD app into a true rendering tool. My renderings compare pretty favorably with anything done with V-ray, but it is a lot of work to get the lighting, texture maps, and other controls that make it work. My lights, for example, end up being a rats' nest of over thirty spotlights. And I just found out that Redshift (which I find inferior to the standard rendering styles, anyway) can't be used with a light with shadows turned off. It just blows out the scene! I'm hoping that these things are addressed in VW2023, but I've not heard that they have.

MHBrown

[line-weight]

2 hours ago, MGuilfoile said:

Someone needs to tell VW to stop adding nonsense "features" that nibble around the edges of their software improvements and start looking at the fundamentals that take it from a CAD app into a true rendering tool.

 

We have!

 

 

[zoomer]

We all have 🙂

 

I did loudly already since VW 2014.

 

 

But I think we can agree that, although still a few new features felt in,

it got noticeably better since at least VW 2022 and VW 2023 releases.

 

Yes, there is still more than enough (even serious) 90ies stuff in VW,

waiting to be ported into 21st century.

But I was really happy (!) with the changes I have seen in the last

two VW releases.