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Rendering linear fixtures


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One of the reasons for learning to use Renderworks properly is so that I can use my client's 3D designs to analyse my lighting positions. I tried to illustrate this in a recent discussion about a display case in a museum project that had a shelf; it was pretty obvious from a section that we'd have shadow issues under the shelf, but I thought it would be good to be able to demonstrate that with a quick render to the client team. I attach an output of my model here.

 

The front lighting comes from two spots, arranged as per the light track positions in the room, and the spot settings of 10˚beam/20˚ spread  to mimic the fixtures' performance. Under the overhanging elements of the case, I placed two linear fixtures that I made with the linear light tool - and set the output of the strips to 4000 lumens (an arbitrary value). The colour temperatures of the two types of fixture are deliberately  different (3200K & 5600K)Light test - linear & spots.pdf so I can see where each light source is going.

 

My query is why has the spot fixture got such a nice smooth beam performance, whereas the linear fixture is producing a lot of 'noise' & pixellation? The render was set to final quality, as I wasn't sure which value to adjust in the custom settings.

 

Thank you for any pointers in improving this.

 

Jonathan

 

 

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4 hours ago, markdd said:

Make sure you have set the Quality setting at the bottom of the Object Information Palette to High or Very high. That should help a lot.

Hi,

 

Thank you - previous settings for this was 'From render mode', so I changed the setting to 'Very high'.

 

However, this has made very little difference to the appearance of the output.

 

 

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Another approach might be to create a linear piece of geometry and apply a glow texture. You would have to render with indirect lighting enabled, but you can create some really smooth linear lighting. It often takes a really high output on the glow texture (sometimes as high as 1000+%) but the results can be pretty great. 

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Thank you for the responses. I set the anti-aliasing & indirect lighting to very high, soft shadows & blurriness to high & environment lighting to medium for this render (everything else left the same). The results are so much better, thank you.

 

The downside was the render time went from around 5 minutes to 120 minutes(!). I assume I'll need to find some settings in-between these two extremes to give me a faster render with acceptable results.

Light test - linear & spots3.pdf

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Any time you add indirect lighting and high quality anti-aliasing, your render times will be impacted somewhat drastically. I would suggest spending 30 minutes or so experimenting with glow textures. They only emit light if there is another light source in your drawing (VWX does not recognize a glow texture as a light source and as such, the general ambient light from over your left shoulder cannot be turned off) and it requires indirect lighting to really see it. The results can be really great however. 

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