Area light now support two types of shape, square and rectangle. But sometimes you can see the light as being cut on the floor due to the squared nature of the shape. What about a sphere shape? Btw, the cubic interpolation for the floor shader may reduce a little bit the problem, but it’s still there…
with cubic interpolation:
another setup:
You can use a point light (“lamp”) instead. Lamps support soft shadows, too.
Right. But I heard that area lamps in blender are fake ones (hence the odd intensity/distance behaviour). If it’s real then a proper area light recode (with shape variety too) would be the best thing to hope for
You can dupligroup an light type you like across any shape to form custom area lights. Use a spot which already has a cone shape.
Would a cookie help?
I haven’t tried this but what about 2.5 + colour management + linear workflow + inverse square on lights that offer it?
you can use YAFARY with IES lamp
where you can define the shape of beam you want
so easy to do with yafaray
but hope this can come directly into blender
happy blendering
I know about the sphere lamp and the dupligroup, but the results are different. Area lamp are way better the lamp or dupligroup. And about Yafray I cannot, I want to stick to BI. Often is possible to achieve one particular result with some workarounds, but I think that area lamps are a different story from other faked lights…
Is the area light just a bunch of spotlights put together right now? Because, when I make an area light simulate light coming in from a window, the specularity doesn’t reach the full area light size.
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Like in this picture I made(the link above), the specularity of the window doesn’t reach all the way to the ends of the window, just about 80% there.
i read something similar on a Lighcut thread, where unclezeiv was explaining stuff about light areas. Also, do you remember the Arealight Terminator Coffee Campaign (i’m a proud donator!) that took place during peach? It was meant to fix a strange beaviour of arealights, dunno if was related to theirs (supposed) hackish nature.
No I don’t remember that (Arealight Terminator Coffee Campaign).
http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/coffe-for-peach/
http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/area-light-fix-light-not-shadow/
@henrymop: That’s what I thought too. You can actually make your own area light by dupliverting a lamp across a plane. Take the total intensity and divide it by the number of dupes. This is essentially the way many commercial packages implement the area light.
IES profiles are the way to go for a more realistic look, too bad Blender Internal does not support them.
I have not heard that 2.5 is going to be any better with lighting either. We have to wait for Lux, Yafaray, and Mosaic to be ported to actually make use of real lighting models.