Hi!
I’m trying to simulate a fluorescent tube (actually, a T5 6500K lamp, but I think this would be too much detail)… Thing is, I set emmit to 1.0, and, though the lamp looks all white, it doesn’t cast light…
So, is there anyway to make the surface of an object to actually cast light?
Thanks in advance,
Hugo Ferreira
Radiosity is one way, another way is Yafray. Yet a THIRD way (and slightly simpler) is sticking two opposing area lights with approximately the same surface in with the fluorescent light, with the light’s texture set to cast no shadows.
Actually, two lights is if it’s out in the air. For recessed fluorescent lighting you just need one area light.
If you want your mesh appear to glow the way flourescent tubes do give them a halo material. Be sure you ahve a descent number of verts, evenly spaced across the tubes and set the halo size to a low value in order to keep the glow close to your tubes. Then you can adjust the alpha value of the halo to set the strength of the glow. In this image I have the halo size set at .06 and the alpha set at .35 so that the bulbs beneath the halo can be seen.
I’m interested in the yafray solution since all my renderings are made with it. Can you please show me how do you enable such thing? Because I’m actually modelling a Light Fixture, I need as much accuracy as possible… This means that I really want the light to be cast in a circular way, and be reflected by a chroma surface, rather that try and cheat with the area lights.
Thanks!
Hugo Ferreira
No ideas?
Cheers!
Well that’s not really feasible with the current “stable” YafRay, you can also only approximate it with regular area lights there. The re-design i’m working on however features mesh-lights, as you can see below:
But the code still misses a lot of features, and the blender integration is an even larger building site, but getting better thanks to custom ID-Properties of 2.43.
But if you want an even more advanced light simulation with refector for the lamp etc you better watch out for those MLT renderers like indigo, and prepare for some serious rendertimes…
Well. You can fake it by turning ‘emit’ up (using yafray and GI). But since you can only move it up to 1 via blender, you need to export the file as a yafray xml and adjust the emit to a higher setting manually.