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Restricting lighting pattern


GeoffreyP

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For an interior scene, I have a texture applied to a rectangular polygon which represents the graphic in a lightbox. How can I brightly light the graphic so that the lighting pattern is restricted to the area within the frame of the box? Just putting a spotlight object in front of the polygon creates spill light outside the desired area. Thanks in advance for your help

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What I do is creat a box, on one side of the box I cut a hole that is the same proportion as the area I want to light, but much smaller. Then I place a point source inside the box

Now I get the center of the cut out aligned with the center of the area to be illuminated and move the box backward in space until the cropped area of light matches the area to be illuminated. If it is not far enough back to be out of the rendered scene, move the light source farther away from the cut out.

I hope this makes sense, Good Luck

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You could try to light the area from the back. Make the light box screen slightly transparent and place the "projector" behind it. I don't know if this will work but it might.

Another option is to export the rendering as an image file and then adjust the brightness and contrast of the screens in photoshop.

Good Luck

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You can do it if you have VW spotlight. Go into photoshop and create an image with a black background and a white rectangle (or any other shape or pattern). You can then create a gobo texture using that image and insert a gobo projector in the drawing, then change the field angle of the projector to get the right size rectangle.

If you don't have VW Spotlight this won't help you at all. Perhaps NNA should consider adding this feature to the standard package.

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Thanks for the reply, Mike. I tried your method, which works very well, but my problem is that the model has sort of a narrow corridor situation with lightboxes facing each other - not enough room to move the light "projectors" back far enough to be out of sight. Is there a way to make an invisible mask for a light source? Thanks for any thoughts

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Thanks for the reply, Mike. I tried your method, which works very well, but my problem is that the model has sort of a narrow corridor situation with lightboxes facing each other - not enough room to move the light "projectors" back far enough to be out of sight. Is there a way to make an invisible mask for a light source? Thanks for any thoughts

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