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Lights not working in VW2020


MHBrown

Question

I created a hanging light as a symbol and placed a spot light in as well so that it would illuminate my scene. When placed in a scene, however, it does not illuminate anything. Is it not possible to put lights into symbols and have them work? That's not all. In general, my lights have lost the ability to cast shadows of any time when using the Renderworks Styles settings (interior-Final, in this case). Again, there are lots of lights and not one shadow. I did a small test file with a chair, a wall, a floor and a single spot light. I got shadows in OpenGL and Final Renderworks, but nothing in the Renderworks Styles - Interior. This is is VW2020 SP5 on macOS Catalina. Any ideas?

thanks,

Mike

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6 answers to this question

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

There are a few things that can make this happen only in Renderworks because OpenGL does not use some of these options.

Usually there is something very close to the light that is blocking the light.

1. Each light has it's own cast shadow option. If it's turned on then geometry will cast shadows. (Obvious, but keep reading...)

2. Each Texture has it's own Cast and Receive shadow options for Renderworks. So there is a second level of shadows at work on the object level.

3. Objects without a texture will always cast a shadow, so if there is an object in front the light that does not have a texture non-shadow casting texture assigned it will block the light. Objects will usually cast shadows in openGL but not completely block the light.

 

You can put lights in a symbol and the symbol will have an additional brightness control. You can NOT put a Spotlight lighting device in a symbol and have it work. Lighting devices must be unique instances in the drawing.

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Thanks, klinzey, I will check out those situations.  Regardless of that, this is a user interface problem that VW needs to rectify.  There should be one and one place only to set the visibility and shadow-casting properties of a light source for ALL rendering modes, and other toggles that affect this behavior should be removed.  I had not noticed these changes up through vw2017, but since I started using vw2020 all of a sudden my former methods for lighting are not working.

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Thank you, klinzey. I'll check that the textures have shadows turned "on." To respond to P Retondo's puzzlement about why shadow casting can be texture dependent. If—and this is a big "if"—it works as it does in Strata3D then there is a good reason for textures to not cast shadows. I often use Strata for rendering. One of the nice things is that in Strata if you make a texture not cast shadows, then light will travel right through solid objects. This is very helpful when rendering interiors because you can leave the ceiling in place and just make its texture "shadowless." You can then place the lights above the ceiling and not worry about turning the visibility of the ceiling on and off or cramming all your lights below the ceiling. If VW does not work this way then, yes, having shadows controlled by textures seems puzzling to me, too. Sometimes you can have TOO many ways to do something. Thanks again for the help!

Mike

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On 11/5/2020 at 2:58 PM, P Retondo said:

Thanks, klinzey, I will check out those situations.  Regardless of that, this is a user interface problem that VW needs to rectify.  There should be one and one place only to set the visibility and shadow-casting properties of a light source for ALL rendering modes, and other toggles that affect this behavior should be removed.  I had not noticed these changes up through vw2017, but since I started using vw2020 all of a sudden my former methods for lighting are not working.

I would tend to disagree with this. It is crucial to be able to have the potential to cast shadows or not per texture. If you place a light object inside a piece of geometry, the texture applied to that geometry needs to not cast shadows in order for your light to work. 
 

Not casting shadows is often helpful when using process renders when you want to investigate how things look without waiting for shadows to render. 

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