Soft focus light?

[drmdzh 0]

How do you soft focus lighting instruments? I thought is was using beam and spread, but they are greyed out in the instrument info palette. 

[markdd 761]

The setttings are always greyed out when a light object is being used by a spotlight instrument and you can only adjust beam angle from the OIP. In the OIP Set Field Angle to the size of beam and set Beam Angle to say ½ the size. That will give you a degree of softness to a circular beam. Shuttered beams cannot be softened to my knowledge although setting them to soft shadows helps slightly.

 

I hope that answers your question.

 

Mark

[drmdzh 0]

I'm changing the beam angle in the "Edit Light" menu, (Field angle = 34; Beam angle = 16) and the gobo pattern is still super sharp, does not change when I adjust beam angle.. Not sure what's going on. 

 

 

Edited November 29, 2016 by drmdzh

[markdd 761]

Sadly with shutters and gobos you can't soften as in real life. I go to photoshop and blur gobo textures there. This would be a really great enhancement to to Spotlight. The ability to "add frost" would also be very very useful.

[drmdzh 0]

oh! thank you so much for letting me know, now I can stop fighting the program!

 

Can one use anything with an alpha channel as a gobo texture?

[drmdzh 0]

On 11/29/2016 at 0:24 PM, markdd said:

Sadly with shutters and gobos you can't soften as in real life. I go to photoshop and blur gobo textures there. This would be a really great enhancement to to Spotlight. The ability to "add frost" would also be very very useful.

How do you export the gobo in order to work with it in photoshop. Thanks.

 

[mjm 166]

I get the gobo from mfr catalog online, then directly into PS, blur and rename actual name + blur

Works really well.

[PVA - Jim 2,395]

For existing gobo textures in the document I believe you can right click > Extract Image(s) on the texture in the Resource Manager to get the source image for editing.

[drmdzh 0]

Thanks all!