"Energy distance factor" for lights in Cycles renderer
Hello.
Is it possible to implement a "distance factor" that multiply the light energy automatically to reach a special light distance?
My problem: When I'm working with real world units like kilometers or hundred of meters, then many Blender features aure not working or are acting strange. One of them are lights in Cycles. When I try to lighten a scene that has a radius of 250 meters e.g. then I have to use a light energy value of 10.000.000.000 to see objects that are 250 meters away of the light! I understand the reason for this, but for artists it's a strange situation to type in such a high value. So why not using a distance factor that make this easier and more logical. So in my situation you could set an regular emission strength of "1" and set the distance factor to "250 m". Blender would multiply it internal then. This would be more undestandable for people.
See my example below for a possible implementation.
5 Comments
This would be interesting, but as other comments have suggested already. It would be more useful to have X %/energy at Y distance.
A thing that would make this even better is if we can also tell it what this distance means. Since scaling a whole scene isn't atypical, and it would be wonderful if all the light intensity scaled accordingly.
Currently if one scales down a light source, its brightness is constant. Ie, everything gets brighter. Scale the scene up and everything gets darker. Having it be constant would be great. But this could be a simple "local scale" as an option.
A quick side-note: in a CG environment, any light will only truly reach 0% contribution at a distance of infinity. This won't be a useful measurement without a non-zero cutoff value.
Multipliers can be handy, but I'd much rather see an actual distance value when looking at distances. Much easier to understand at a glance.
If you put a point lamp, 0.1mm in size (smaller than a common led light), and want to enlight an area of 250m (radius), you'll have to make it 10.000.000.000 or even more. Blender behaves correctly. Just add a multiplier node. "No" from me
@: You are not wrong but I would like to see more user friendly system in Blender. So how about a real world value for lights? Like Lumen or Candela. Or do I think in the wrong direction here?