Hi,
I’m finding that one light appears very different than others even though the settings are all the same. Please see image after half an hour of rendering. Each is an area light of size equal to the bottom of the cabinet under which it’s placed. The two cabinets indicated are the same size and so the lights are too. I already tried spot lights which were all identical and the problem occurred then too. The materials of the wall and countertop are the same throughout but the light at the left always appears stronger.
Anybody have any thoughts?
Th
anks.
Good evening, @GTRender1! The first thing I think of is that maybe the area light is exactly in the same position as the bottom of the cabinet and z-fighting is occluding half of the light. Something I just read in another thread that makes a lot of sense (when you think in three dimensions) is to move the camera under that cabinet and render from there to see if you can tell what is causing the light to appear dimmer.
Give that a shot and let us know what you see!
Thanks for your reply. I wondered about something blocking the light too but the z values of all the area lights were equal and slightly below the cabinets so that seems unrelated (maybe not?). I placed a camera under the cabinet as you suggested and the problem remained, although this was helpful in that it showed very clearly that there was in fact in a problem.
It now seems that at least some lights that were set to be invisible were not. This seems like a flaw. I had been experimenting with spot vs. area lights, with each group set to be invisible while the other was visible. When I moved the left area light well away instead of just setting it to be invisible, that solid rectangular block of light went away.
Another apparent problem (intended behaviour?) related to object visibility emerged: The spheres of light at the origins of the spot lights were intersecting the under-cabinet light fixtures that had been set to invisible. So I could not see the fixtures but the spheres were making contact with them nonetheless and causing inconsistencies from one sphere to the next.
Having removed the area lights, leaving only spot lights, and deleted the light fixtures entirely, all elements seem to be rendering correctly for now. I’m interested to see what happens when I put the area lights back as a substitute for the spot lights.
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