Advanced Ambient Light - question

XoechZ

Hello!

I really love the Advanced Ambient Light by AoA!
But there is one thing I would like to do:

Is it possible to give the light more of a direction? By default it works like a point light, but I would like to use it more like a spot light - or even better - an area light or soft box to light only parts of a scene (like a character).

Is this possible?

Cayman Studios

You mean like the Advanced Spotlight or the Advanced Distant Light?

Szark

you can only limit the extent of light spread say for a town and outside that town the light fades away to nothing and it is more like a light dome than a point light.

kyoto kid

...the Advanced Spotlight works the best for this as it has different falloff settings including squared (Inverse Square Law) and linear. You can adjust both the spread and shadow softness to achieve the desired effect and even just flag the subject you are lighting to be illuminated.

They also come with a selection of GOBO gels (and there is another set available in the store) for which the size and blur effect can be adjusted.

XoechZ

Thanks for your answers!

I know about the Advanced Distant and the Advanced Spotlight. I own and use them all :-)
What I am looking for is a substitution for the UberAreaLight, which looks cool because of its soft light and shadows, but it kills my render times.

So maybe this is a suggestion for AoA:

What about an Advanced Area Light as a future project? :-)

kyoto kid

...I still use the UberArea light, but only for creating mesh lights.

You can also adjust the range of the Advanced Ambient light as well. It defaults to 10m (adjusting to 0m gives it infinite range). You can also move the light's centre point along all three axies

XoechZ

Thanks Kyoto!

Yes, I know, but then it works like a point light, emitting light to all directions.

Hm, I just wonder if it would work when I put an Ambient light into a box with one open side.... lol, I really have to try that :-)

kyoto kid

...never thought about doing that as the Ambient light already has a "soft shadow" built in so any surface should keep the light from spreading through it. The trick is creating the box as it would have to be constructed with plane primitives that are grouped together (which in turn could be grouped with the Ambient light). I'll have to experiment with this myself.

XoechZ

Ok, I have treid the box method. It does not work at all !!! Too bad.

No matter how big or small the box is, the result is always the same. The light does not care about the box and spreads the light in all directions. You can even place the light in a completely closed box and it still lights your scene. Strange but true. I have also tried different light radius settings, but that also does not help.

glaseye

You're asking for the impossible (well as good as) with the AA lights. After all. it is not a 'normal' light like from point, spot- or distant lights (with shadow turned on....). It is, as the name indicates, just for ambient lighting, the light that is all around. AAlights do not produce shadows; the shadowy effect you may see is the effect of the ambient occlusion.
Now with AAlights, it is possible, to a degree, to select, what surfaces should be lighted , you 'could' change the diffuse strength on all surfaces in the scene you don't want to be lit to 99% and set the AAlight to not illuminate objects with a diff strenght of 99%, Can be ahellofajob,

However with the some experimenting you may get some results you might like..
In the 3 images below a little example of what i mean.

-test1, the only light is the uberarea light from the candle flame

-test2 added an advanced ambient light at 25% intensity and with the light radius set to 10m (default), the backwall is about 2,5m away from the aalight, so well within lighting range

-test3 same setup, but with the radius set to 2m, the back wall is not lit anymore

kyoto kid

XoechZ said:

Ok, I have treid the box method. It does not work at all !!! Too bad.

No matter how big or small the box is, the result is always the same. The light does not care about the box and spreads the light in all directions. You can even place the light in a completely closed box and it still lights your scene. Strange but true. I have also tried different light radius settings, but that also does not help.

...how about this, a spotlight set to 180° spread, shadow strength at 100%, custom falloff (linear), shadow softness set to something like 50% inside the "box"?

kyoto kid

...double post due to stupid site crash.