Spotlights

[Fiona]

Hi,

Is there any way to stop light spreading? I am currently working on a disco and would love to include those shape projector lights so that when the light hits the wall or floor it is in the shape of a star or whatever it started out as.

Any help would be apreciated, thanks!! ^_^

[Polinalkrimizei]

Hey Fiona,
there are no "presets" in indigo for the desired effect in indigo. But indigo simulates the real world quite well, so the way to go is to actually model the light sources as they are in reality. So take a look at how spotlights are made in reality, you'll find a lightsource, reflectors, a shade, transparent star-shapes... (sorry not sure about these english words...).
If that seems too complicated: take a tube on which one end is open and put an emitter inside. or make the inner faces of the closed end the emitter. You could then assign a texture to the emitter or place some "tranparent paper" in front of the tube to get the disco effect.
Both ways demand a lot of trial and error and a lot of fiddling to look right. I'd love to see your WIP here though!

[Fiona]

Well here it is so far, this view has been rendering for about 18 hours over 2 computers. I am pretty pleased with it but think the shape projecting lights would be great!

Thanks for your ideas I will definitly try them out!

[Pibuz]

that is definitely cool Fiona!
Quite unusual I think!
I really think that this could come out very well adding lots of light glares and stuff!

[WytRaven]

Reminds me of TRON

[Polinalkrimizei]

This is not to be considered a serious render, just an illustration of what i meant in my previous post.
The star is pretty ugly, and the spotlight is just a cylinder with an emitter inside (the emitter is about halfway down the cylinder. that's why the light is not equally distributed, it gets reflected by the inner walls of the cylinder, so they act like a additionall light source).
For your purposes you should model the spotlight much more real-life-like...
The light is visible cause I used an sss medium (a cube around the scene) with an sss-value of 0.03.
Your picture is really nice, it's good to see something else than glassware or rooms with some furniture...
I think sss would suit your scene quite good, but on the other hand it is gonna take reeeeaaaalll long to get as clean as your actual image. And it's gonna loose its nice tron-like touch as well...

[Fiona]

That's fantastic, just what I was looking for!
I will try that out when I get 5 minutes.

Thank you! ^_^