Directional Area Lights
I feel area lights should have a native "directional" parameter. This would allow deciding how "parallel" generated light rays should be. Setting it to 0 would make the light-emitting surface shoot rays indiscriminately in all directions, as if it were the surface of a fluorescent tube, while a value of 1 would make its rays completely parallel, as sunrays breaching through a gap in a wall. This is a very desirable feature to efficiently light closed environments, faking, for example, the presence of an off-camera bright room just around a corner. This feature is present in other major software and replicated in real-life photography studios by putting special honeycomb grids in front of softboxes. I would have even tried implementing it myself in cycles but I am really not very familiar with the cycles codebase.
13 Comments
Something like this? {attachment areaLightmp4}
* @zero.osellame * Thank you for mentioning that method, I am aware there are a few ways to work our way around this lack. But it would be really nice to have a native implementation of it. Both for setting up the scene quicker, as well as, possibly, improving performance.
Okay, a little follow up: Today I have prepared a prototype of how such a feature might work: youtu.be/EFL1g0PLOUU
I have also started a topic here to further discuss the feature.
* @Matteo Falduto * Well the devtalk discussion looks promising!
this should be marked as done
Should be changed to done since someone did it.
i missed that thing from corona render where there is a feature called directionality which exactly does the same. i think spotlight should have different shape options
How different is that from playing with the radius of a spot light ?
* @Alexis Benoit * AFAIK spot is only circle-shaped, no way to make it non-directional nor in between, emits from a point instead of an actual shape (so it has no volume whatsoever and no effects on gloss direct).
* @-L0Lock- * snipboard.io/yotFwn.jpg Using the radius slider, I get a reflection from the spotlight on my chrome sphere. if the radius is at 0 my spot is non directionnal with very hard shadows. However it's true that it is circle shaped only. A square option would be nice
* @Alexis Benoit * Blender 2.79 had a square option for spotlights, which was really useful. A comeback of that option would be great! (Might be a slightly different/separate request from this one, because it was part of the spotlight itself).
* @Alexis Benoit * It is quite different: the request here is about a shaped kind of "Projector" of parallel rays. it could work with spot only if (once you crank down the radius to very low values) you can place them very very far away. But then how would you deal with occluding geometry?
I miss that.