Is it possible to make a distant light more "fuzzy"?
Hylas
Posts: 5,071
I don't usually work with distant lights. I placed one in the scene I'm currently working on, it seems like the best way to achieve what I'm going for, for a number of reasons. But now the light is super harsh and all the shadows are really sharp. I don't want to decrease the lumen, I like the amount of light there is in the scene, I just wish the shadows were less harsh. Is there a way to make distant lights more "fuzzy" or "soft", if that makes sense?
I work with IRAY.
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Try using 2 or 3 lights slightly offset and half, or third the intensity. That should give you a penumbra effect and the same overall lighting.
Use a camera for your render instead of the perspective view.
In your camera you need to enable depth of field with the focal point on the priamry subject.
The lower the f-stop value the smaller the in-focus are is. (Lower values will blur distant objects more.)
Thanks for the answers! I was already using DOF. I tried using kenshaws method and it only kinda worked... it gave me three slightly softer lines instead of one harsh one. I didn't love it so I went back to the original set-up, with one single distant light. I was hoping there is a box I can check or a value I can adjust to make the distant light softer, but it appears that doesn't exist. It's ok, I think the render came out fine none the less! :)
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You might be better using a plane primitive and giving it an emissive surface. I rarely use Distant lights. Planes are like light panels, and the bigger/more distant you make them, the softer they are.
Btw, in order to make life easy, I create a camera and parent the plane to it. Then I can look through the camera and 'aim' the plane's light.
That's a great idea, thanks!
The built in lights aren't really very good for iRay.
I almost never use them except for quick tests.
I built a bunch of emissives to mimic things like softboxes and other photographic lights and use those, HDRI's and prop lights for my scenes.
Well that's one pretty awesome render!
@Hylas
You are using the wrong light. The distant light mimics the sun, which gives sharp shadows. For lighting, the rule is larger, closr equals softer. Use an Iray spotlight with geometry and it will mimic a real world softbox. This gives the same effects as emissives w/o the render time penalty. With Iray spotlight geometry, emissive lighting is really needed unless you want to show a "real world" light in the scene.
It is supposed to be the sun though, coming through the windows.
I don't have good experiences using spotlights to mimick the sun or outdoor lighting, so I never do that.
Thanks!
Distant lights have very limited options in Iray. Better use something else.
For this situation I'd use the Iray Sun & Sky mode. I'd create a camera that looks through the window, in the direction you want the sun to shine. In the Environment settings, select that camera as a sun node. Make sure Dome Rotation is at 0.
Now you can increase the SS Sun Disk Scale value to soften the shadows. I like to use values around 12 but you could also go higher.
SS Sun & Sky mode is very nice. But it's a bit of a pain to set up the way I want. I'm not necessarily after 100% physical accuracy but just want to be able to set up the lights that I think suits the artistic look of the scene so distant lights are a bit easier to work with.
I'm not very familiar with the physics of light but I thought the following would work - putting a plane in front of the light with opacity set to e.g. 50%. I thought it would imitate atmospheric haze. But while it does appear to make the light dimmer, the shadow edges remain crisp. Am I doing something wrong? Should I add a "noisy" texture to the plane instead to get softer shadow edges?
For softer shadows, sun and sky is really a better way to go, but you might also try and plane primitive with an emissive light instead of using a distant light. You can adjust the size of the plane and the distance from your scene to adjust shadows that way. I'm not sure of what you can do to the distant light as it's built in Studio to get softer shadows, I rarely use them for this reason (in iray at least).
*Thinking on this a little more, I haven't done it with iray because I prefer other options, but in 3delight sometimes you coud get a better softening effect than the shadow softness setting by having two distant lights that were very close but just slightly different angles from each other. I would worry that it would just give you two "steps" of harder shadows, but it might be something to try if you like distant lights.
I find sun-sky a little annoying ad almost always use DS spots for lighting, but set to rectangle and a pretty large size (around 100), including for sunlight, if I'm not using an HDRI sun. For a sun, I turn up the luminosity, usually tighten the beam, and put the spot a long way away, so that the "rays" are nearly parallel.
Two examples of spot suns.
Thanks for your suggestions guys - it's really nice to get prompt answers to your questions :-)
I tried using a large spotlight and an emissive light. It looked interesting but not quite what I wanted - the shadows would become too fuzzy in that case.
I got nearly what I wanted with the Sun & Sky mode - the shadows are still well defined but not as sharp as with a distant light. Yet, I can't see exactly where I position the sun when I'm building the scene and it also has too many dials to adjust. So I wanted to explore other options.
For example, if it's a cloudy day but the clouds do not form a uniform layer, then there would be some spots that are a bit better lit than others. I think in that case using a textured plane should work better. I haven't tried it yet, though.
You can use a spotlight to position the sun in the sun-sky (you set it as a "ss sun node" in the environment settings) you don't have to use a spotlight - you can use anything but I personally find the spotlight the easiest for me to control as I can look through it and position it exactly
Why use a spot light and an emissive? The sun doesn't have an emissive.
I meant I used a spotlight and an emissive light on different occasions
Thanks I didn't know about it.
Thought about another use of a plane with an opacity map - light going through a canopy of trees.
If you have Draw Ground set to ON then there is a slider to lower or raise the shadow intensity. Unfortunately it only lowers the intensity of the shadows on the ground and not on any geometry in the scene.
I'm wondering if this isn't becoming overly complicated. Let's see . . . what is the sun? A large round ball of light a long way away, right? So . . .
Create a single spotlight, set it's geometry to Disc, drag it to various distances and experiment with the geometry sizes. Width/Height should always match for a perfect Disc shape.
Two things. Distance makes light shadows harder. Small geometry size makes shadows harder. If it's (say) at Ztrans 10,000 and the size is 3.00, it should do something approximating sunlight. As for the actual amount of light, that's a whole other story.
@n.jmurov
You don't get soft shadows with the sun unless it is diffused through a cloud layer, haze fog, etc. If you don't understand the physics of light at least a bit, you will always have a challenge with Iray.
Obviously we're not only talking about my render anymore (which is great!).
But in my case, I didn't use Sun-Sky (or simply an outdoor HDRI) because the scene is indoor, but I used IRAY Section Planes to cut off the ceiling and most off-panel walls to speed up the render. I'm a CPU renderer and doing an actual indoor scene is not an option.
So using Sun-Sky or an outdoor HDRI would have flooded the room with light from directions where it shouldn't be coming.
My scene actually does have an HDRI but it's an indoor one. I put an aditional Distant Light to achieve the effect of sunlight streaming in through a window. The wall with the window (to the character's left) is the only off-panel wall that's actually there.
<headdesk> You just smacked me with a 2x4 labelled "obvious" — thanks for that! A little while back I was trying to use point lights with Disc geometry in a scene, and I was having tremendous problems with the fact that you can't see the size or shape of the geometry setting in the Viewport, or even (for a Point light) which way round it is. I never thought of using a Spot light...
LOL. Don't worry! If I had a buck for all the things I'd never thought of until later, it'd be drinks on me!
Normally, I hate quotes that include images cause we already seen it above.. but...
DAMN!
I could look at that all day.
Awesome job... Awesome job!
Thanks!
This is exactly what I'm trying to achieve ;-D
You can create the moon though, with a "really big" emissive plane that is way up in the sky. Soft shadows.
https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/1036376
Don't use a distant light, use a spotlight with rectagular geometry or plane panel with emmissive surface. That will diffuse the light.