Stopping shadow-less lights from shining through everything?
SnowSultan
Posts: 3,643
Is there any way to turn off shadows for Studio lights and have them *not* shine through objects? Even the Age of Armour Advanced lights shine through objects if shadows are not turned on. I love his lights, but the Ambient one can be very troublesome when you're trying to illuminate a hallway and even with falloff set, light still comes through the wall and into an adjacent room.
Thanks in advance.
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Comments
Turning shadows off tells the light to ignore obstructions. You could try using negative lights to tame the brightness in areas that should be unlit.
Instead of turning off shadows to the lights, try turning off shadow casting for those meshes you don't want shadows from.
Curious, why are you using lights without a shadow if you don't want it to pass through objects? If you simply don't want a visible shadow, you can turn the shadow softness up to effectively remove them from the scene.
If a light stopped when it hit a wall it would be effectively casting a shadow anyway.
So I guess the answer is no, hehe. Thanks very much though.
@Herald: Basically I was having problems in two situations trying to illuminate a hallway in the background of a main interior room. I didn't want shadows cast because there was an object edge that would have cast a large shadow and canceled out most of the light. Turning shadows off though caused the light to bleed through the back wall and into the main room.
The Advanced Ambient light is causing the same headaches; I tried using that instead because it doesn't cast hard shadows (just AO), but it goes right through walls too.
Would have just liked an additional option to have light stop when it reaches a surface whether shadows are on or not, that's all. There's always just adding the light in Photoshop anyway. :) Thanks again.
(*sigh*) Programmers change the laws of physics and yet some people are never happy. Programmers turn off gravity, They let objects pass through each other like ghosts, they make light jump through hoops like trained dogs and still people ask for more. (*sigh*) "give 'em an inch..." 8-s Personally, I'd be satisfied with a good "Make Art" button.
Flagging should work for this on the AoA lights, shouldn't it? Flag it to only illuminate the materials of that back area?
Flagging should work, but flagging is not working correctly in DS 4.7. Illuminate Only acts like Do Not Illuminate and vice versa. Bug reports have been submitted.
Age of Armor's Advanced lights, for example Advanced Distant light, you can tag surfaces to receive or not receive light from his lights.
(I forget exactly how to set it up, but his lights have great documentation on how to do it.)
Oops, that is what I get for not pushing post before walking into a meeting. LOL.
Yes, I know about the flagging options (didn't know about the bug though, hmm). That can work of course, but not if multiple walls or other materials share the same surface. I know you could then use the Geometry Editor to separate the specific polygons of the wall that you need to flag...but yeah, it's far easier to just postwork it.
They're also not artists and think in completely different ways.
Turning gravity OFF ain't the trick. ;)
Turning gravity OFF ain't the trick. ;)
Ay! There's the rub! If it weren't for all those users, computer engineering would be easy. I knew back in the 70's that letting commoners get their hands on computers would be a mistake. They'd want to play and do silly things with them. Now, I'm just sitting back and watching it happen, while the house of cards gets shakier all the time, and saying "back in my day..." and "I told you so...". 8-Q
And yeah, I agree about the gravity thing. Flying is easy, the crux of the problem is survivable landings.