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Soft Edge


lightingguy

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One way of doing this is to use the Beam Angle and Field Angle attributes of the lighting instrument. If you have a 30 degree instrument, Vectorworks often sets these to be identical i.e. 30 degrees. In a real lamp, the field angle is the area of light where the intensity drops below 50% (please excuse my layman's definition here!) So by setting the beam angle to say 20 degrees, you get the >50 intensity in the 20 degree area and the <50 intensity in the surrounding 30 degree area (ie 10 degrees of fading intensity around the edges). This way the lighting instruments behave like real lamps where you need to overlap the field areas to get even coverage. When you set the beam and field angles to the same (e.g 30 degrees) you end up with a very hard edge as there is no diminishment of the light in the field area. I have found that most of the instruments in the Vectorworks libraries set the values to be the same, to get the instruments to behave like their real-world equivalents you will need to consult the photometric charts from the manufacturers. I have found I get slightly different results depending on the rendering mode selected but generally you get nice soft edges. Hope this helps.

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