Creating Lights

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cholme
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Creating Lights

Post by cholme » Fri Jun 11, 2010 5:34 pm

I am trying to get a handle on creating lights. My dilemma is that it seems like none of the settings make a difference, except the temperature. Power at 100 looks the same as at 200 and Efficacy looks the same at 17 and 50.

How do you create lights that mimic the real world? i.e. If I want a 150 watt incandescent bulb? What are the settings for that. I know there is a preset for 100watt, but sometimes I need different bulbs.

Thanks for any help.

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dakiru
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Re: Creating Lights

Post by dakiru » Fri Jun 11, 2010 6:25 pm

cholme wrote:I am trying to get a handle on creating lights. My dilemma is that it seems like none of the settings make a difference, except the temperature. Power at 100 looks the same as at 200 and Efficacy looks the same at 17 and 50.

How do you create lights that mimic the real world? i.e. If I want a 150 watt incandescent bulb? What are the settings for that. I know there is a preset for 100watt, but sometimes I need different bulbs.

Thanks for any help.
Try to change from the Reinhard tonemapping mode to Camera. This might help.

cholme
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Re: Creating Lights

Post by cholme » Sat Jun 12, 2010 7:29 am

I feel like I keep missing something. I am trying to create a virtual studio. I design and make furniture and want to be able to put them in similar lighting schemes to show to clients. I created a cyclorama and a couple studio lights. When I render the scene it doesn't look right. The table in the scene doesn't seem to cast shadows and it just looks bad.

I attached my skp file and a render of the scene... maybe I am missing something?

This was rendered using Camera, with an ev of 3 and iso of 1600
The light is Preset incandescent 100w with the power adjusted to 500
Environment is off
Attachments
Cyclorama.zip
(3.45 MiB) Downloaded 192 times
Table Render.jpg

ieatfish
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Re: Creating Lights

Post by ieatfish » Sat Jun 12, 2010 7:47 am

Looks like your bottom surface is on the same layer as the Bulb. So it is emitting and hence no shadows on that surface.
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cholme
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Re: Creating Lights

Post by cholme » Sat Jun 12, 2010 9:52 am

Not to get too off subject... but I don't totally understand how and when to use layers. I have looked in all the manuals and nothing is very clear.

Thanks for your help.

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galinette
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Re: Creating Lights

Post by galinette » Sat Jun 12, 2010 10:08 am

Light layers should be used only when you want to fine tune your scene lighting after rendering, hence avoiding to render several times for this. It's very useful : you can adjust the power of light sources in post processing. It should be done for fine tuning only and the scene light powers should be already roughly balanced before rendering, otherwise you will have noise or render time problems.

They have one drawback : memory consuption and IGI size is proportionnal to the number of light layers. As this is also multiplied by resolution and supersampling, you can quickly fill up your memory. With a full hd render, 4x supersampling, the size is 400MB per light layer.
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cholme
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Re: Creating Lights

Post by cholme » Sat Jun 12, 2010 10:28 am

I am soooo sorry.... I absolutely feel like an idiot. I know what layers are supposed to do... I just don't know how they work.

I looked at my SU model, and couldn't see where the bottom was on the same layer as my lights.

Please, if someone can walk me step by step how to use layers, I would so appreciate it. It is creating Layers in SketchUp? or Layers in the Indigo UI? or Both?

I feel like I am being thick about this, but I just don't get it.

ieatfish
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Re: Creating Lights

Post by ieatfish » Sat Jun 12, 2010 11:24 am

I'm sorry, I used the word Layer when I meant Material.

Material: How the object looks/acts when acted upon by light.
Layers: Used for lighting. For example, a material on layer 0 will be lit by light on layer 0, but not layers 2 or 3.

Chances are you won't need to use light layers right off the bat, or at least until you've mastered the other parts of Indigo.

So, you make an object in Sketchup and apply certain material (in Sketchup) to the object. You can then open the Material Editor from the Skindigo Toolbar and tell Indigo how to 'translate' those materials when you render the scene. Your issue was that the 'floor' was the same material as the Bulb. This caused Indigo to think the floor was also an emitter.

I hope that made sense.
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cholme
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Re: Creating Lights

Post by cholme » Sat Jun 12, 2010 4:51 pm

Ok... even for a rookie like me, that was a pretty rookie mistake.

I do always have a dilemma when I want things in me scene the same color, but different "materials" what to do? I thought creating a duplicate texture in SU would do the trick. That was what I thought I did in this case. I used white from the color palette "color 000" then duplicated it and renamed it "bulb" for the light bulb. Does this not work? How do you create different materials with the same color or texture?

ieatfish
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Re: Creating Lights

Post by ieatfish » Sat Jun 12, 2010 6:56 pm

cholme wrote:Ok... even for a rookie like me, that was a pretty rookie mistake.

I do always have a dilemma when I want things in me scene the same color, but different "materials" what to do? I thought creating a duplicate texture in SU would do the trick. That was what I thought I did in this case. I used white from the color palette "color 000" then duplicated it and renamed it "bulb" for the light bulb. Does this not work? How do you create different materials with the same color or texture?
When you duplicate a material in sketchup, it also duplicates the material in Inidgo. So what I do is make sure to name each material well. For example, Floor, Bulb, Table - Wood, Table - Glass, etc. I don't apply materials in Indigo until I am ready to start rendering. That was I know each material had no Indigo data associated with it before I assigned it something. I'm guessing you probably just accidentally painted the floor with the bulb color on accident.
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Reinuvader
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Re: Creating Lights

Post by Reinuvader » Sat Jun 12, 2010 7:10 pm

You have to check every sketchup material in indigo material window too. Often happens that if you create shiny white plastic, and after that for example you want to create white paper material witch should be diffuse. So if you check your new paper material in indigo material window, it probably is also phong as your previous material. So you have to switch this new material manually to diffuse. And another thing I noticed in your scene: You left sky and sun turned on, and hided them just with box around your scene. But probably faster is to forget (delete) the room around your subject and turn Sky and Sun off in Skindigo environment settings. You also have to check "Black" to use as your environment.
Attachments
Cyclorama table.jpg

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