Hi Guys,
I’m trying to create a mesh light that emits ‘sharp’ directional lights in blender. Can anybody help me?
Something similar to the image in the middle (I don’t want to use lamps, just mesh lights)
Thanks in advance,
Peter
MODERATION
Your post is not newsworthy or a finished product so no reason to post this support question in those forums !!!
Moved to Support / Lighting & Rendering forum
Isn’t it so, that if you actually model a lamp, that would be directional in real life, it would also be directional in blender?
See how real spotlights work and model that.
However, this is highly inefficient.
Which is why blender lamps are useful. Why not use them?
It can be done quite easily, but it’s less than efficient.
If you really want to, create a cone, remove the bottom face, then knife cut in half. Apply a texture to the upper half with a diffuse and emission shader mixed with backfacing as the factor (emission shader on the inside) and apply a black diffuse to the bottom half.
The deeper the bottom half, the sharper the cone, but you’ll really have to ramp up the emission strength to get anything meaningful.
Thanks, although I join in 2014, I’m very new to the Blender Artist Forum.
Something similar to that, but I want the light ‘throw pattern’ to be the same shape as the mesh omitting the light (if that makes sense), I Know that’s not how light works in real life but I will be grateful if you can help me out.
Ahh I see what you are getting at, but this will be really tedious for me as I am working with alot of mesh lights.
You can do it as Roken says, but as he also says, it’s not efficient. I use a compound for spotlights;
- A spot lamp which gives me means to fake IES look and cone falloff (diffuse and glossy only).
- A spot mesh which adds a glossy/diffuse (whatever) and an emission shader (all except diffuse). Typically also a plastic or chrome mounting ring.
For area lights that have directionality due to a ceiling light with a grid (kinda same effect as from a strip box), I use this approach when I can (with some modifications such as adding a faux grid to the camera visibility using nodes). If I can’t and want to show a better light using an actual grid model, I model it (duh) and resort to the techniques above for trying to speed up the rendering times.
I basically never rely on brute force to do my lighting. It takes more time to learn it and set up a decent workflow initially, but your rendering times will be worth it if it’s something you do for a lot of projects.
Compound spotlight with some fake IES look to make it look more interresting (too much glare, I know :)):
Fake light grid, grid is just a texture, with directionality (doesn’t show well in this snipout) controlled using nodes:
Real modelled light grid, which needs optimization/fakes to avoid horrid render times to clean up nicely:
Thank you all for your replies, but I found a more accurate image that describes what I am trying to achieve.
The effect is known as a ‘pin spot light’
Peter
