IES light visibility

[StompinTom]

Hey hey,

I just started playing around with IES lights and noticed that when I'm rendering a bunch of them, only one or two show up as white. The rest of them still emit light and everything, but they appear as a black material. The lighting is fine, I'm more concerned about their reflections and seeing the light sources in the rendering. I'd rather not photoshop them in afterwards as it seems like a broken feature...

Using Blender 2.49b, Blendigo 2.3.1, Indigo 2.2.12 (64 bit)

[dougal2]

Is it because of the viewing angle? If you are looking at the light at the angle at which it is not emitting, then you won't see any light coming from it.

[StompinTom]

Hmmm... Never thought of that. It's possible, but sometimes it seems like it's not related to that, such as when I'm viewing the lights at an oblique angle (close to the ceiling or from far away), they are visible... I'll keep playing around with them, maybe I'll make sense of this!

[bacon]

This problem I´ve also experienced... it has to do with emitting and viewing angle as dougal mentioned...
I haven´t experimented a lot with it, but perhaps it´s possible to edit .ies files so that they emit a small
amount of light in all viewable directions.

Another trick is to make the ies emitter very small and put it in front of a ordinary mesh emitter that emits
enough to make it visible. I´m not sure if this works well with reinhard...