Area light - unequal light distribution

[bjoerka]

I was playing with lighting, trying to simulate led stripe similar lights.

I used a small area light and saw in an elevation, that the light distribution is unequal compared to the geometry.

The aera light was generated from a rectangle, 2000mm by 10mm.

I compared this to a line light, which has an equal light ditribution.

Maybe a very specific case, but not as expected.

See the screenshots below.

Upper images rendered in vwx. Lower ones "tuned" in ps to show the lightdistribution.

 

 

Edited November 21, 2023 by bjoerka

[Kevin Allen]

Line Lights and Area Lights need love, they have not been upgraded in many, many years

[zoomer]

1 hour ago, Kevin Allen said:

Line Lights and Area Lights

 

 

For my purposes they need too much render time.

(This where VRAY started to finally get faster than standard C4D renderer)

I always fake them by glow textures .....

(Global Illumination activated and higher settings mandatory)

 

But to avoid splotch explosions, you need to have enough glow face area

and enough of them to not need to go much over 200% intensity.

(Usually only 120-160%)

 

9 hours ago, bjoerka said:

The aera light was generated from a rectangle, 2000mm by 10mm.

 

I do not try to mimic the light source body and avoid extreme face aspect ratios.

So I usually fill the whole inner lamp area ....

 

Works great for larger office spaces with typical square ceiling tile lighting

but usually also ok for typical indirect lighting behind gaps like shown by the

VW 2024 start up image ....

[bjoerka]

I think the render time is ok.

But i really like line & area light because they are easy to setup compared to addintional geometry that has to modeled to apply a texture to it.

And often, to get the correct light power out of them, these textures get washed out...

It´s a bit of struggle to find the best and most effective way...

I posted something similar in this topic -> light combination

[zoomer]

18 minutes ago, bjoerka said:

But i really like line & area light

 

I am just coming from the 3DSMax past where you had to delete all occluded Faces

and such tricks to get realistic render times ...

 

Totally OK if it works for you.

And of course mandatory if you need a certain quality for detail shots, correct shadows

or light power .....

 

And no experience yet how these workflows need to change/adapt to real time GPU

renderers like Twinmotion.

[bjoerka]

As long as the realtime engines accept ies files and do a correct interpretation - that would be the best.

In our office we do a lot with UE for visualization (except me .-)) and they often use ies files (to my advice) and the results are fast and quality vice ok.

But if the source program is not able to handle lights correct then, i think, also tw will not represent the correct result...