carl.sutton Posted October 21, 2011 Share Posted October 21, 2011 I was wondering what is the best approach to modelling bar light sources that cast shadows? I have made a pretty naive attempt here in the picture using an elongated omni light below the centre of the fitting, but the shadows it creates does not acurately reflect that of a bar shaped light source (i.e. a bar light shines across its width and not just from a single point). Has anyone got an opinion on a good stratgey for doing this? Link to comment
carl.sutton Posted October 21, 2011 Author Share Posted October 21, 2011 My best approach so far after playing with it a while is to use 3 omni lights displaced underneath the bar fitting, one at each end and one in the centre but turning off shadows for the centre omni light object. This works well at illuminating the environment in a beliveable manner but it is quite peformance heavy having 3 light objects per fitting. If this really is the best way to go then can anyone give me any tips on the best way to increase performance with the lights while maintaining as much quality as possible? Link to comment
michael.zhang Posted October 21, 2011 Share Posted October 21, 2011 I'm not sure, but have you looked at ObjectVolume* classes, such as ObjectVolumeOmni? Link to comment
steve3d Posted October 24, 2011 Share Posted October 24, 2011 why not use lightmap to create a more realistic lighting, and use light mask to exclude the realtime lighting and set the volume lighting effects? We are using this approach to get a very realistic lighting effect with indoor scenes. Link to comment
carl.sutton Posted October 24, 2011 Author Share Posted October 24, 2011 Thanks for the suggestions. I shall give them a try today Link to comment
manguste Posted October 25, 2011 Share Posted October 25, 2011 First of all, you can use deferred lights (Force deferred lighting flag) which are much cheaper. But the best result would be by baking lights into a lightmap, as Steve advised. You can approximate the lamp with a lot of omni lights and bake them (take a look at Lightmap generation tool). You can also set Emission for the lamp material. To light up characters, LightProbs can be used (they can be automatically generated by this tool as well). Link to comment
steve3d Posted October 25, 2011 Share Posted October 25, 2011 Using unigine's lightmap tool is more easy but if you use vray to bake light map, it will give you more realistic lighting but I don't know how to use vray to render the directional light map which has the best result Link to comment
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