Add Diffusion to Lighting (?)

[trashcan]

"Soft Shadows" is never really soft enough for me. In the real world, I'd jus throw some diffusion on a light to soften it up.

 

In VWX, at the very least, I thought I could emulate that by putting frosted glass in front of a spot light, but all that seems to do is DIM the light. 

 

I also thought maybe I could crank the spread up really high and bring the beam angle really low, which, in real life, would soften the shadow as well. But that doesn't work either! 

 

Any ideas? 

[mjm]

14 minutes ago, trashcan said:

"Soft Shadows" is never really soft enough for me. In the real world, I'd jus throw some diffusion on a light to soften it up.

 

In VWX, at the very least, I thought I could emulate that by putting frosted glass in front of a spot light, but all that seems to do is DIM the light. 

 

I also thought maybe I could crank the spread up really high and bring the beam angle really low, which, in real life, would soften the shadow as well. But that doesn't work either! 

 

Any ideas? 

@trashcanright there with ya

[trashcan]

oh man @mjm if you don't have any ideas we're screwed !!! 

[Jesse Cogswell]

The way I've been doing it is by creating a gradient texture in Photoshop and dropping it into the light as a gobo texture.  If you are concerned with syncing with Lightwright, you can put your "diffusion" into the Gobo 2 field and not syncing it with the Lightwright data exchange.  This is also how I cheat the elliptical beamspread of PAR fixtures and linear diffusion when doing museum gallery lighting.

 

 

Identical fixtures with a 25deg beamspread at 15'.  The one above is with a 25deg beam, 40deg field, the other one has the "diffusion" gobo.  The one caveat is that the gobo can sometimes cut off the edges of the beam, so you kind of have to play around with the beam and field settings (I usually make them match since the gobo is softening the edge) to make it the proper size.

 

 

Image as built in Photoshop

 

 

Diffusion texture in Vectoworks

 

 

9deg spot fixture with 10x36deg linear diffusion

 

 

10x36deg linear diffusion gobo texture

 

EDIT: I should also mention that this is using a Lighting Device object from Vectorworks Spotlight, not the vanilla Light object.  As far as I know, there's not a way to do this method with the standard Light object.

Edited May 10, 2022 by Jesse Cogswell

[markdd]

Area lights are the way to do this. However, they take a while to render.

 

The other way to do this is to light the scene with glow textures. However, these don’t have the same properties as light objects especially as you can’t see them in shaded view and they don’t work with backlight textures. 
 

 

Edited May 10, 2022 by markdd

[mjm]

20 hours ago, Jesse Cogswell said:

The way I've been doing it is by creating a gradient texture in Photoshop and dropping it into the light as a gobo texture.  If you are concerned with syncing with Lightwright, you can put your "diffusion" into the Gobo 2 field and not syncing it with the Lightwright data exchange.  This is also how I cheat the elliptical beamspread of PAR fixtures and linear diffusion when doing museum gallery lighting.

 

 

Identical fixtures with a 25deg beamspread at 15'.  The one above is with a 25deg beam, 40deg field, the other one has the "diffusion" gobo.  The one caveat is that the gobo can sometimes cut off the edges of the beam, so you kind of have to play around with the beam and field settings (I usually make them match since the gobo is softening the edge) to make it the proper size.

 

 

Image as built in Photoshop

 

 

Diffusion texture in Vectoworks

 

 

9deg spot fixture with 10x36deg linear diffusion

 

 

10x36deg linear diffusion gobo texture

 

EDIT: I should also mention that this is using a Lighting Device object from Vectorworks Spotlight, not the vanilla Light object.  As far as I know, there's not a way to do this method with the standard Light object.

wow. Even tho I make blurry gobos all the time , it never occurred to me to have it emulate the beam edge dynamics. I've been attempting that through Beam Field differentiation.

Edited May 10, 2022 by mjm