Official: IES lighting effects with Indigo

[Soup]

Hey there everyone, I've just started here at Indigo to work on the documentation and will submit all new tutorials through this forum to get feedback on them.
The first of this series is for the technical manual and focuses on IES lighting.
Download the attached PDF, and you can get a zip of some nice IES files here
A IES viewer can be downloaded from here

Please let me know if you are having any problems with it, or spot some bad wording and I'll get right on it!
Cheers!
-$oup

*edit* Updated, used plane instead of box

[WytRaven]

Nice clean and clear writing style. Nice

[Headroom]

Concise and to the point. Nice! I like the links to the IES files and the viewer.

Could use a little hint that the IES light source shines in the direction of the surface normal of the emitting surface.

Also, as IES file contains the light intensities but no color information, so a hint to set the color would be helpful. The blackbody temperature for a given light source can usually be obtained on the manufacturers website.

It should be mentioned that Indigo only works with IES files that do not contain a vertical angle that is larger than 90deg if my memory serves me right. Indigo responds with an error message if that's the case.

[Jeff Hammond]

interesting and informative. thank you
looking forward to more

[edit] oh, about the actual pdf.. it'd be nice if the links were hot.

[djegoo]

hi

i just downloaded this tut and now, what is an IES + how to use it is totally clear for me.did not think it was that easy ! THanks a lot.
good job.

[jebusk]

Thanks a lot for this.

[neo0.]

Nice. This is exactly what I have been looking for. It might be a good idea to link these IES emitters from the main download page too.

[mutnem]

that was great thanks

[cholme]

Hello. I downloaded the files but I keep getting the following error. I am using Sketchup.

"SceneLoaderExcep: IESDataExcep: IESDatumExcep: Error parsing num_lamps"

I have no idea what this means... any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[CTZn]

Hi cholme, your IES file is trying to define more than one luminaire, this is not supported by Indigo at the moment.

[cholme]

I am sorry, I don't totally understand. I only created 1 emitter, and pointed the IES file to one of those that I downloaded. I don't know why it is trying to use more than one luminary... Please explain.

Thanks.

[CTZn]

Different IES specifications exist, and Indigo doesn't read them all. In your case cholme, the IES file is defining more than one luminary and that's the problem.

If you are lucky you can find the different luminaries defined in separated IES files, if you are techie you can try to operate yourself, or ... pick another one !

[cholme]

I am not quite techie enough to know what I am looking for in the IES files. Has anyone had luck using these files with SketchUp? I tried IES files 1-6 from the files in this thread and all of them give me an error.

[need2blend]

I am having the same problem each time I try to render, it gives me the same error "SceneLoaderExcep: IESDataExcep: IESDatumExcep: Parse error, failed to find 'TILT'"

Please help.

[Bosseye]

Just thought I'd chuck another post in this thread - I've been trying out the IES files on the link above and I'm getting the same errors as the other guys for 90% of them.

Any chance of someone shedding some light (ah ha ha) on this? I'm in the dark (ah ha ha) as to why these don't work.