creating lights that aren't LIGHTS?

Upirium

I have seen products before that instead of being lights like spotlights, they are like...disks, and I can't figure out how to do that?

I want to set up a scene with a light source coming from the top and then from the side but the light seems dull and unfocused and the render is taking forever even in the preview

any advice? i also tried using hdri lights and then covering up everything but the areas i wanted the light to come through with primitves, but it was still too bright somehow 

Drip

They might've been simple primitive shapes (planes, discs, flattened spheres) with their emission dialed up. They're generally easy to use for a variety of purposes. The sharpness of the shadows you assets cast can be easily adjusted with them as well, by making the primitive larger for soft shadows, or smaller for sharp shadows. The size of the primitive also directly affects how much light it provides to the scene, so sometimes you end up tweaking it's size for a while to get the sharpness of shadows right, and then need to adjust the emission itself again.

Sometimes it's possible to simply turn an object already within the scene into an emissive surface, for example a ceiling. You wouldn't want that ceiling within your camera view, but it can provide a nice even background lighting on top of spotlights you use.

JVRenderer

iDiru said:

I have seen products before that instead of being lights like spotlights, they are like...disks, and I can't figure out how to do that?

I want to set up a scene with a light source coming from the top and then from the side but the light seems dull and unfocused and the render is taking forever even in the preview

any advice? i also tried using hdri lights and then covering up everything but the areas i wanted the light to come through with primitves, but it was still too bright somehow 

I think you are referring to emissives. You can turn any geometry surface into emissives, Select object (disk or evena wall) goto your surface tab, scroll down to emission, change emission color from black to any other colors (white for white lights), increase the luminance.

margrave

Read the lighting tutorial in my Art Studio thread. It tells you all you need to know

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/514441/the-mar-graveyard#latest

j cade

Drip said:

They might've been simple primitive shapes (planes, discs, flattened spheres) with their emission dialed up. They're generally easy to use for a variety of purposes. The sharpness of the shadows you assets cast can be easily adjusted with them as well, by making the primitive larger for soft shadows, or smaller for sharp shadows. The size of the primitive also directly affects how much light it provides to the scene, so sometimes you end up tweaking it's size for a while to get the sharpness of shadows right, and then need to adjust the emission itself again.

Sometimes it's possible to simply turn an object already within the scene into an emissive surface, for example a ceiling. You wouldn't want that ceiling within your camera view, but it can provide a nice even background lighting on top of spotlights you use.

If you're just doing simple shapes, planes, spheres, circles, etc. you should just use spot lights or point lights, which you can set to any of those things, but with more conntrol, and more optimized

Upirium

j cade said:

Drip said:

They might've been simple primitive shapes (planes, discs, flattened spheres) with their emission dialed up. They're generally easy to use for a variety of purposes. The sharpness of the shadows you assets cast can be easily adjusted with them as well, by making the primitive larger for soft shadows, or smaller for sharp shadows. The size of the primitive also directly affects how much light it provides to the scene, so sometimes you end up tweaking it's size for a while to get the sharpness of shadows right, and then need to adjust the emission itself again.

Sometimes it's possible to simply turn an object already within the scene into an emissive surface, for example a ceiling. You wouldn't want that ceiling within your camera view, but it can provide a nice even background lighting on top of spotlights you use.

If you're just doing simple shapes, planes, spheres, circles, etc. you should just use spot lights or point lights, which you can set to any of those things, but with more conntrol, and more optimized

i actually tried both and neither of them is doing what i want it to do for some reason 

marble

My usual setting for a spotlight is to set the geometry to disk and both dimensions to 100cm - that way I don't get harsh (sharp) shadows. I add two zeroes to the default luminance setting (from 1500 to 150000) but less if I have a bright HDRi, for example. Most of my renders are inside so it is difficult to get the HDRi to light everything the way I need, hence the spotlight.

Upirium

marble said:

My usual setting for a spotlight is to set the geometry to disk and both dimensions to 100cm - that way I don't get harsh (sharp) shadows. I add two zeroes to the default luminance setting (from 1500 to 150000) but less if I have a bright HDRi, for example. Most of my renders are inside so it is difficult to get the HDRi to light everything the way I need, hence the spotlight.

i ended up forgoing the spotlight in this picture and just use some luminence from a fireplace and edited it, because for some reason the cube was not working correctly? 

i took a pic of me using the spotlight and not using the spotlight in the preview window

thisi s without:

this is with:

i had the spotlight inside the hole shining out and on the main viewport you could see it was lighting the bed but there was no difference in the render.

 

 

 

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e

It's possible you were thinking of Ghostlights, there are a few products in the shop here based on that system.  It's basically a prim, such as a plane prim or a sphere prim, set to .0001 opacity (or some other tiny percentage like that, I'd have to look) with emissives set.  I've used these frequently, though there's also tutorials online on how to make your own ghostlights.  Here is a thread about making ghostlights, also.  There are also Youtube videos like this one:

...and this one:

Pretty sure I remember there being at least one tutorial online somewhere else, but can't find it in my saved links at the moment.