Why am I losing the colour of my emission objects when in Cycles?

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Attempting to recreate this scene in Blender:

YuSqkBnZ
YuSqkBnZ2560×1440 720 KB

Was originally working in Eevee and was able to get the red glow of the street lights by making them emission objects:

Screenshot 2022-09-17 at 15.39.50
Screenshot 2022-09-17 at 15.39.506400×3600 868 KB

But I was having trouble getting the pink lighting from the signs the way I wanted it so I switched over to Cycles. That got the pink lighting to work really well, but now the red light from the street lamps is just white (using fSpy, so you can can still see the red light from the reference image, but not from my models):

Screenshot 2022-09-17 at 15.39.25
Screenshot 2022-09-17 at 15.39.256400×3600 981 KB

1 Like
2

This is due to the intensity of the Emission object, high emision values will turn the object white (although light cast will stay red).
To get around this use a mix shader with one emision shader to give you the strength of the light cast and another to give the colour of the object. Use a lightpath node’s “camera” output as factor.

Em
Em1095×795 48 KB

6 Likes
3

That worked. Nice one!

1 Like
4

Brilliant answer. I’ll try that later :grinning: