Lighting Instrument Removes Global Lighting

[Haydenovative]

Hi Team,

 

I've posted regarding this before, but I cant find a current thread so please redirect me if there is already a discussion on this. 

 

Adding any lighting fixture to a drawing removes the global lighting regardless of whether or not that light is turned on. This is frustrating in renders where we would like to see the lights hanging in the roof without necessarily turning them on and focussing them. There is a few tricks we use to get around this such as duplicating the lighting layer and converting to 3D polygons and then turning off the original lighting layer. or putting a lot of Renderworks lights through the scene. There was mention of this becoming something that could be toggled on or off. Has anyone seen any progress with this in 2019? Thanks in advance.

[JBenghiat]

Any time you add a render light or object creating a render light (like a lighting device), Vectorworks assumes you are lighting with intention and turns off the virtual worklight. 

 

If you want more general light in the scene, you have two strategies. One is to add in some render lights (in the Visualization tool set). I like using one or two directional lights with shadows turned off. 

 

You can also edit the lighting options from the  View menu, and increase the amount of ambient light in the scene. 

[Haydenovative]

@JBenghiat Thanks for that. I do usually add work lights as you mentioned, and upping the ambient light creates an odd new effect rather than a straight correction, it tends to wash out the facets of things in open GL. I would really like to toggle off the assumption that I am lighting with intention or at least not remove general lighting until one of the fixtures is turned on. We do so much lighting work within a greater production that does not require focusing and illumination, it really becomes an annoyance to need to have all the light layers turned off while working on the model.

[JBenghiat]

As you noticed, the ambient light really just raises the black point in the drawing, so not always ideal.  Turning on ambient occlusion can enhance the look significantly.

 

The behavior of the global light has been this way for years, and may even be a necessity of OpenGL rendering, so this probably won't change any time soon.  I recommend setting up your work lights either as a symbol that you can easily drop in from your favorites library or a layer that you can import from a library file.  The advantage to having the lights in their own layer is that you can quickly toggle them on and off with the Nav palette instead of going to the Visualization palette.

 

A shadowless directional light at 45/45 is going to have an almost identical effect to the global light, with the exception that the global light always comes from over your left shoulder regardless of the view orientation.

[Mickey]

On 12/9/2018 at 7:33 PM, Haydenovative said:

upping the ambient light creates an odd new effect rather than a straight correction, it tends to wash out the facets of things in open GL. I would really like to toggle off the assumption that I am lighting with intention or at least not remove general lighting until one of the fixtures is turned on. We do so much lighting work within a greater production that does not require focusing and illumination, it really becomes an annoyance to need to have all the light layers turned off while working on the model.

This.

Can't we just toggle it off / on?

How hard would that be to add?

It's no different than turning the layer off and on?

I'm going to submit a wishlist request. I suggest others do the same to get this in front of the developers

 

Wihslist thread here

 

 

Edited February 4, 2019 by Mickey

[Bradley King]

So was looking for a solution to this exact problem, and here's a quick hack. If you drop a helidon anywhere in the same layer as your lighting fixtures, it will essentially replace the ambient lighting at more or less the same values. It's not *exactly* the same but it's pretty close.

 

Just make sure shadows are turned off on your OpenGL rendering settings.

[Cory Pattak]

Yes I can second this. Attached are some photos of @JBenghiat's Beam Viz Beams and you can see the difference between them with a Helidon and without. 

 

[JBenghiat]

40 minutes ago, Bradley King said:

So was looking for a solution to this exact problem, and here's a quick hack. If you drop a helidon anywhere in the same layer as your lighting fixtures, it will essentially replace the ambient lighting at more or less the same values. It's not *exactly* the same but it's pretty close.

 

Just make sure shadows are turned off on your OpenGL rendering settings.

 

If you want a lighter weight solution, go to the Visualization tool set, find the render light tool, select the directional light mode (the one that looks like a sun), and insert anywhere in the drawing. In Object Info, you can turn off Cast Shadows, so that you don’t need to turn off Cast Shadows in OpenGL (useful if you’re looking at gobos or rendered shutter in BeamViz 😏). The default azimuth and elevation should be 45/45, but if not, set that as well.

 

The only difference between the shadowless directional light and the default render light is that it doesn’t stay oriented to your screen. If you want to add a little more fill from the opposite direction, you can mirror the light and bring down its intensity in the OIP.

 

To speed this up in the future, select the light (or lights) and create a symbol. Add the symbol to your go-to library. Alternatively, you can have the render light in a layer by itself, and add this layer to your template or Standards file. Import the layer to new drawings, selecting the option to include objects. This method is advantageous if you want easy control of of the light, as render lights are mastered by their layer or class. Simply toggle the layer on and off to control the global light.

[scottmoore]

I always have a class called “Ambient Light” and one called Ambient Realistic” in my default template and in each class is a light object, more or less as J mentioned above. You can toggle these on and off at will and are in every drawing I do. I use the “realistic” ambient to simulate  the ambient light emanating from stage. To either bolster the reflected light in a render.

 

You should spend a little time with this to dial in what works best for you. Also note, when rendering from sheet layers, that you can set the overall lighting value per viewport which can be very helpful with OpenGL renders.  

 

Mildly off topic, the sheet layer DPI makes a HUGE difference in the quality of OpenGL renders.  I generally set for at least 600dpi (sometimes as high as 1200dpi) for OpenGL white model renders. 

[Andy Broomell]

44 minutes ago, scottmoore said:

Mildly off topic, the sheet layer DPI makes a HUGE difference in the quality of OpenGL renders.  I generally set for at least 600dpi (sometimes as high as 1200dpi) for OpenGL white model renders. 

 

And keep in mind this goes hand-in-hand with the literal size of your viewport. The number of pixels rendered is a product of the viewport size and the raster DPI.

[scottmoore]

44 minutes ago, Andy Broomell said:

 

And keep in mind this goes hand-in-hand with the literal size of your viewport. The number of pixels rendered is a product of the viewport size and the raster DPI.

This is another topic that I’ll jump into soon. 

 

“Camera dpi vs sheet layer dpi vs image export dpi”. Unless there is already a great thread on this subject. If so, I would love to see that. 

 

Always appreciate you insight sir!!

[trashcan]

Two years later, is it still true that you need to add ambient lights to a scene in order to have something resembling default scene lighting? 

[scottmoore]

I would think so. It’s not at all difficult, and I highly recommend adding various types of ambient light to your drawing template. You might have to adjust the Z coordinate per design, but otherwise it will be quite useful and become part of your workflow since you will always know on what class/layer these are located.  If your ambient lights receive color by class it becomes very quick to adjust overall ambient light color and intensity via the class color. 
 

I also include a “black light” object on its own class which is basically an ambient light turned down to 1% and colored dark gray. Turning this on allows me to “fool” VWX so the app will turn off the global illumination. This is crucial when lighting a scene with nothing but textures. 

[Andy Broomell]

52 minutes ago, scottmoore said:

I also include a “black light” object on its own class which is basically an ambient light turned down to 1% and colored dark gray. Turning this on allows me to “fool” VWX so the app will turn off the global illumination. This is crucial when lighting a scene with nothing but textures. 

Simply adding a Light and switching it Off can also accomplish this. 
 

Hopefully in the future Vectorworks will give us more transparent control over the Default Light.

 

i.e. being able to turn it off even when there aren’t lights, and turning it on even when there are. 

[BobS_50]

Hope its ok to gate crash here (I realise its a spotlight thread)...but this thread seems to be covering what I am experiencing.

 

I've been getting used to VW2019 (Architecture) and been puzzling about the impact of light fittings on my openGL renderings. I have a simple model of a kitchen design, inserted a VW cooker hood symbol and the rendering on the modelling went seriously dark to show the impact of lights within the symbol. Is this standard? Can someone explain what happened ?

 

I tried turning off the display lights but that didn't seem to work so I just added a heliodon to the model but that casts shadows/shade. Do I need to add several more to get an even colour tone on my different elevation views (something I've seen Jonathan Reeves do on Youtube to get architectural shadows), or is there a way to have a default light level as seems to be discussed in the thread?

 

TIA 

Bob

[Andy Broomell]

@BobS_50 - The symbol you inserted has a "Light" object inside of it. Once a Light object exists anywhere in your scene, the "default light" goes away and the only illumination comes from the Light object (plus the ambient light under View > Set Lighting Options).

 

It sounds like you found that Light object and switched it to "Off" - however the light still exists in the scene so this doesn't solve your issue. Instead, try one of these options:

• See what class the Light is on (or put it on a class of your choosing) and set the class to Invisible. When Lights are hidden by turning off their class, they're no longer in the scene and don't affect the scene lighting. If all Lights are turned off via classes, you'll get the "default light" back.
• Or, simply delete the Light from inside the Symbol, if you don't ever want it.

It can also help to turn on the Visualization Palette (under Window > Palettes) to see what Light objects are currently in play. Note there are radio buttons to switch between "Current Scene" and "All" lights.

 

 

Alternatively, yes, you could add additional Lights to fully light the scene; depends on what you're trying to do in the end. Just note that OpenGL will only display up to 8 Lights. Renderworks does not have this limit.

 

Let us know if you have further thoughts or questions.

 

 

Edited August 20, 2021 by Andy Broomell

[BobS_50]

@Andy Broomell

Thank you ....very helpful... as was your drawing title block info on your web site!

 

One of those situations where I have an idea what's going on but unclear what is the principal method of control !

 

 

[scottmoore]

On 8/18/2021 at 12:04 PM, Andy Broomell said:

Simply adding a Light and switching it Off can also accomplish this. 
 

Hopefully in the future Vectorworks will give us more transparent control over the Default Light.

 

i.e. being able to turn it off even when there aren’t lights, and turning it on even when there are. 

Copy that. I think at one point that was not the case so the aforementioned black light has been my go to for a long time.