KeyShot Forum

Technical discussions => General discussion => Topic started by: hve on April 25, 2022, 04:28:15 AM

Title: Is this possible ? Soften edges on area lights
Post by: hve on April 25, 2022, 04:28:15 AM
Hello,

I'm experimenting more with area lights (thanks Will Gibbons for the great tutorials) and try to use them in my scenes but I'd like to soften the edges (like we can in the HDRI editor using the falloff value) is this possible and how can I do that ? thanks in advance
Title: Re: Is this possible ? Soften edges on area lights
Post by: PerFotoVDB on April 25, 2022, 04:53:39 AM
+100! Very much needed
+
barndoor control
Title: Re: Is this possible ? Soften edges on area lights
Post by: TGS808 on April 25, 2022, 07:53:51 AM
You can do it by attaching a color gradient texture to the Area Light node.
Title: Re: Is this possible ? Soften edges on area lights
Post by: hve on April 25, 2022, 10:45:33 AM
Thank you will check that out !
Title: Re: Is this possible ? Soften edges on area lights
Post by: hve on May 04, 2022, 01:11:49 AM
Quote from: TGS808 on April 25, 2022, 07:53:51 AM
You can do it by attaching a color gradient texture to the Area Light node.


Hello, so I tried this out, but I can't manage to cancel out the black part of the Area light, when I use a gradient I always keep seeing the black part of the area light in my reflections, is there a way to make this completely transparent ? This would be great so I can make my custom lights using alpha maps, so far I don't seem to be able to do so.

I also created a transparency map for an EXR image but no way to make the black part transparent so I wonder what I could do to achieve this ? thanks

Thanks, Hans

Title: Re: Is this possible ? Soften edges on area lights
Post by: hve on May 04, 2022, 01:25:52 AM
What's strange is that I can achieve this perfectly using the HDR editor + EXR files, maybe I can try to edit these images and remove the black part but not sure this is technically possible without losing the intensity of the EXR file

Title: Re: Is this possible ? Soften edges on area lights
Post by: hve on May 04, 2022, 02:27:24 AM
I think I found something with emissive light but I can't seem to get the same intensity as with area light and hdri lights , sad we don't have an opacity input on the area light nodes
Title: Re: Is this possible ? Soften edges on area lights
Post by: Anindo Ghosh on May 04, 2022, 02:56:42 AM
Area light is the solution I came up with as well.

The low intensity you note is just a matter of scale, for the Intensity value, around 10x the numerical value compared the value for Area Light seems to work well.   
Title: Re: Is this possible ? Soften edges on area lights
Post by: hve on May 04, 2022, 03:56:26 AM
Thanks Anindo, yes indeed seems to work, but emissive light renders very noisy vs area light so I wonder if I'm not just going to stick with the HDRI solution using high res exr files or do like Will Gibbons to model a plane with the exact form as the hdr maps