strange light behaviour

1st Official Post

    Hi guys, I recently stumbled upon this odd behaviour.. I'm attaching images to show...

    Basically, the tube light by the left of the corner is ok, if I copy it and rotate 90° I get a strange circular light, don't know why...


    ..I have some difficulties in general using the lights provided by Enscape... I'm listing a few points to enhance the system, in my opinion:

    1. ReThink the way we can place the light objects in the model. At the moment it's quite complicated;

    2. Possibility to make soft shadows from light objects (at the moment AFAIK we can only cast strong shadows, I wish it could be adjustable..)

    3. Add to light objects the ability to read material masks (or use masks themselves), in order to achieve cool illumination effect through cloths, curtains, or masked textures in general...


    Thanks!

    • Official Post

    Hi pibuz


    thanks for the report. What's happening here is that Enscape is trying to determine the optimal influence limit (or radius) for each light source by shooting a number of rays in it's surrounding and then we evaluate their length. This allows us to reduce the influence radii for lights in very enclosed spaces on the one hand and on the other hand it allows to enlarge the radii enough in more open spaces, that the light still reaches nearby surface (think street lights for example).


    In your example the light source is very much constrained in each direction by opaque geometry, therefore we determine a very low influence radius, which you can see for the light on left. As the radius estimation is a stochastic process (taking random samples) the results may vary depending on the surroundings, thus the different result for the light on the right.


    For the effect you're trying to achieve here I'd personally suggest to use emissive surfaces instead of actual light sources. There are other downsides (as they might not always be considered, e.g. from afar), but the other limitations mentioned above and also harsh shadows don't apply to them.


    Hope that helps :)


    We do hope to improve direct light calculation (& shadowing) for area lights with ray tracing based techniques in the future, but this is probably going to take a few release cycles (& will probably require more advanced hardware accelerated ray tracing than we have available now).