Really daft question.
I have seen a few videos, using Version 2.71 through to 2.73 where someone puts an area light in the scene using Cycles render. When it is displayed in the viewport, it is as I would expect, like a rectangular flat plane.
However, every time I add an area light, or change a sun to an area light, it remains as a ‘point’ light with a directional line for the angle of the area light.
I’ve tried searching through properties etc but cannot find any toggle to display the bounds of the area light.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
check the light size… it may be to small to be drawn.
If the area light is set to square, you’ll have only one size. If it’s set to rectangular it will let set the X and Y size.
Yep, definitely an area light. After much messing around, I found out if I scaled my lamp stupidly huge, the rectangle started to show. Of course, by then, the light was so dim due to scale I had to bump the strength up to over 1000 for it to show.
Dunno if this is a viewport glitch and it is meant to be visible at lower scalings or not.
I found scaling until the ‘directional line’ scaled out of view was the point at which you could barely start to make out the rectangle.
Coming from LW I miss the visual"clue" for area lamps, though I am unsure of what benefits an area lamp would have over an emitting plane anyway.
Instead of scaling the light, I advise you to change the lamp size in the Lamp panel. This way, the size of the light will be in Blender Units. So, a area light with size 1 will show as a 1x1 BU light.
Scaling the light produces the same effect, but then the only way to check the real size of the lamp is to multiply the size in the Lamp panel with the scale in the Object panel.