I am very new to both Sketcthup and Skindigo but I have learned alot the last week and am currently working with IES light files to get my downlights to look as I want.

BUT I have a very weird problem which keps coming up.

Let's say I create a downlight and then make the downlight surface in blue and then I go into the material editor in skindigo inside of Sketchup. I then asign the material the preset of 34W Fluorescent Tube (cool) and then I scrool down and choose my IES light file from my harddrive.

Then I render the the scene into Indigo Renderer and here comes the weird part. And this happends about every other time EVENTHOUGH i have changed NOTHING in the settings in the material editor, what happends is that I always see the actual light coming down the wall and then hitting the floor which looks perfect, but sometimes the ACTUAL "lightbulb" goes dark. I mean the roof is completely black but you can still see the light coming down from it.

This happends like every second time I render eventhough nothing has changed.

If I go back and remove the downlight completely it usually workd to render it one time, but then the second time the same things happend again.

I have attached a printscreen of how it looks when it's being rendered and as you see the light is there on the wall but the actual downlight is not lit.

I have noticed that this always goes away if I remove the IES file, BUT then the light looks like disaster as it's going all over the place and I really need to be able to controll the spread of the light in this scene so that's not an option.

Please can someone help me?

Thank you in advance!

Kind regards

Emile

Hi Emile.
While working with IES files it is normal not to have the lighting surface bright. I don't know if it's an issue or something, but I think it kinda has to deal with the angle stored inside the IES file itself.

There is no way to make sure the emitting surface is bright: I usually don't care about it and add a little flare in PS, if the light source is visible..

hey,

What i find is if you look at your ies in a viewer the actually light piece itsself 9 times out of 10 isnt lit up, what you should do is when your done with your render, take it to photoshop and light the light piece while your touching your final images up

hope it helped

I've had this a couple of times, a dark light fitting when using an IES file - as the others, I have to tweak in photoshop.

Not ideal though, light fittings aren't dark when lit and I shouldn't have to use PS to make it look correct should I really. However the awesomeness of IES files outweighs the odd darkened fitting I think.

IES lights are some kind of tricky files. They reproduce a tridimensional light distribution, applied to a bidimensional geometry. I think this is the point where some problems are generated. You guys are right about the "black light source" issue, but you kave to admit that applying IES lights to surfaces INSTEAD of modeling a very complex internal light strucuture (with all the tiny parts that make that particular light ditribution possible) is useful indeed.

In this case, like in any other cases, if you want a REAL lifelike result, you would have to model like real life (model the light spot in each one of its thiny components); if you want to spare some time, you're welcome: use IES lights, but accept a little approximation.