Hi,
I have lights set up as point lights with internal IES data. I am getting spherical reflections for all the lights.
Any way to eliminate this? See red arrow pointing to problem.
Reduce the size of the light:
This will also sharpen up the lighting from the IES profile. IES data is taken assuming a true point light source. A bigger light source will soften the effect, much like a bigger light will cast softer shadows. The bigger your light is, the more detail you will lose from the IES data.
Is this how IES is implemented in other software? Or is IES always sharp or have separate radius control from main? 0 radius gives unnatural shadows. Making it senseless for bigger light fixtures that does have IES data available.
IES is an old format intended to serve the illumination industry, it was originally specified in 1986. It came out the same year this did:
Soft shadows hadn’t really been born yet.
The trick lies in balancing between realistic and good looking. In the OP’s case, the physical lights are obviously smaller than the defined radius of the lamp, So the shadows would never be that soft anyway. I’d imagine if you scaled an IES lamp a reasonable amount, you probably wouldn’t lose out on too much of the fidelity of the recorded data. Recording IES like data for a true area light gets into light field rendering, which is cool, but heavy duty (read: slow) when it comes to rendering.
It’s that old? Wow, I had no idea. And yeah I’m old enough to have owned many Amigas and C64s.
Real3D (later Realsoft 3D) was my first 3D software other than a rather peculiar one that only had a few primitives but could trace reflection rays on an A500 - damn that took a long time 