Spot light source, square / rectangular cone
Having the possibility to make square cones for spot light sources, would be really useful in some cases, such when you need to model a projectors and car headlights etc.
Having the possibility to make square cones for spot light sources, would be really useful in some cases, such when you need to model a projectors and car headlights etc.
4 Comments
To be fair, if all you want is to project textures from light like a projector or car headlight, it's already possible, in multiple ways.
With a spot light, it requires a bit of fiddling and can give a distorted lens-like effect, you need to set its Radius and Blend to zero, then add the texture in its shader, use Normal mapping, and offset the Mapping node's position to 0.5 and scale to the texture's aspect ratio. The lens distortion can be changed by scaling the mapping scale (hence I use a Vector Scale node instead of just the Mapping node's scale input, so that you can set the scale ratio once and then use the scale value as a lens distortion factor). The size of the projection is simply handled by the light object position.
With an area light set to rectangle, no lens-like distortion, but easier to setup and handle. Just set the spread to zero, the shape to the right ratio, and load the texture in. Then all the rest is handled by moving and scaling the light object.
Demo File
This is good, but I think having it directly in lamp settings would simplify things very much. Basically tool can give you additional ideas that you can easily test if it works for your project or it can make it hard to finish your ideas or force you to do some sort of a research if it even is possible to do your idea. I for example didn't know that area lamps can be used like that. I knew about spot lights tho.
Blender anyways is having a problem where useful things are hidden behind "do your own tools" -wall. Or "to have this one functionality to work, you need to click the correct check boxes in 3 different settings tabs" (for example caustics and mist pass). It will cause everybody to repeat this kind of things in every project they do. That's why people do addons that kind of simplify those processes, but those could already originally be done in a simplified manner imo.
Include what exactly? A new shape for spots, why not, but I don't think it will help with your actual goal of projecting textures.
If you mean a simpler way of projecting, what do you envision exactly, and how would it fit in the software?
I mean... It's not a hidden feature. Any light can use nodes, and therefore can project textures. They each do it in different ways, it's up to you to chose how to do it depending on what you need.
Not knowing something is possible doesn't necessarily mean the software needs to be changed to fix that for you.
Yes and no, addons can cater to very particular needs because they are made by the community and used only by those who need them. Adding every possible simplification to cater everyone's needs is unrealistic for a single software with a limited dev manpower, and more importantly: a recipe for cluttered GUI that tanks the UX down by being overwhelming.
Include an alternative setting for the lamp setting to change the shape of the cone. I am thinking that this is very useful feature for lighting purposes. Hard to think why it would not be useful.
With simplifying, I mean that you don't have to hide important stuff behind random menus. It's completely different design philosophy that Blender doesn't follow atm. Current philosophy for Blender seem to be that you just have to have all settings somewhere, but they only rarely are linked by any means to make the process of creating easier. Instead of organizing them based on their "meaning", they should be organized based on the workflow. We are not here to for example learning physics or advanced programming with Blender, but instead we are trying to work with Blender to achieve something, so the workflow is more important than the meaning.
Alternative philosophy could be for example to check what features are used more often and then make sure that those features are more visible and more easily reachable. And more rarely used features you can still keep around behind those menus.
Random example. When you have "apply menu" (ctrl + a), you should have there "apply modifiers" as well. And it should be the same button from "convert menu". "convert to mesh". You can name it "apply modifiers" or what ever in this other menu, since we are not learnig programming here, but instead trying to achieve something. It's also completely ok to have same button in multiple places, if it helps the workflow.
What Blender tried to do with the tabs, was to make the relevant things more visible based on the work you are doing, but imo we are only halfway there with those tabs.