How to select appropriate IES lights

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Greetings to the community! Nice to be here!

I’m gonna start off you guys with a question, that i have been unable to get a clear answer on google yet. So i recently started playing with IES lights for interior scenes and they seem to add a class to the final result. My question is though. How do you select the correct IES light out of the thousands that are out there? I see something that kind of suits me but there’s almost an infinite amount of other lights that look the same but have different values.

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Well, they are all based on real life lighting elements. Pick one that matches?

Like if you have a pendant light in a kitchen, get an IES file for a pendant light.

same with a wall sconce, a chandelier or a can light.

finding a visual reference of the look you are trying to achieve will always help as well.

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While I probably have something like 10,000 IES profiles on my system, I don’t have a tool for viewing them and testing takes too much time. I tend to fall back on just a few collections, i.e. the pixar collection.

But yes, it’s just to add a bit of flavor. I find them kind of impossible to use as their “texture flavor” breaks down when you add size to the lamp using them. Making you choose between nice distribution but hard shadows, or softer shadows but distribution is not sharp. Even for “peculiar luminaries” nobody caught me for not using the correct IES.

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