Stubbornly Dark Iray Spotlight

jim_doria

I know Iray light problems come up a lot, and I've had this problem and solved it in the past. I've done all the obvious: Render settings set to Scene and Dome (checked it at least 4 times) Tone mapping settings at defaults except for ISO, which I boosted to 2400, which makes things look brighter not darker.

The rest you can see in the picture. I have one spotlight, looking down on a pile of bones. Viewport rendering is on the left, view from the spotlight on the right. Nothing I can see that's blocking the light. Luminous flux is set to 50000000.0.

The bone pile should be almost too bright to look at, but all you can see is the ambient environment / emissive light coming from elsewhere in the scene. I've deleted the spot and tried it with a new one. I've rebooted.

Any other ideas of what might be causing this weirdness?

Gordig

Check your render settings. Is the environment mode set to Dome Only or Sun/Sky Only?

barbult

Gordig said:

Check your render settings. Is the environment mode set to Dome Only or Sun/Sky Only?

Because spotlights are "scene lights", which are excluded by the two settings Gordig mentioned. Try Dome and Scene and see if that helps.

cgidesign

As he wrote that Dome & Scene is active that does not seem to be the issue.

Maybe the "Emission Color" is set to black?

And it is DS 4.12 - maybe somebody knows about spot light issues with that old version?

jim_doria

Thanks @cgidesign - you nailed it! It was not about the Emission color but about the program version.

I'd been avoiding upgrading beyond 4.12 because I was worried about something going terribly wrong, but last night I bit the bullet and upgraded both DAZ & my video drivers to the latest versions. Now the spotlight works as intended! Plus now I have Filament. Woo hoo!

cgidesign