lights from spots desapear!

[leoangelozi]

Hello everyone, good afternoon.

I'm facing an issue that started to show up after I put the mirror material on the scene. The spotlight disappeared. How do I solve this?! It's something decorative, and I didn't want to put it in Photoshop.

[RRIS]

I think it would help if you show the scene before you apply the mirror material, or draw a circle on what we should be looking at, because it's not really clear to me what the problem is.

Reflective materials won't really show your light spot, they will show reflections. So it would seem logical that you don't really see them in the mirror, or your dark counter top. They do seem to be working, as your water tap is casting a shadow on the counter top.

Also, I don't think a spotlight like that will show up visibly in your scene, that just works for area lights or self illuminating objects.

[leoangelozi]

In fact, my intention is to create only decorative lighting, which does not influence the overall light of the room as much. I know that's not the case, but looking at real life, putting a lamp in front of a mirror, the result is that you see the light in the mirror, and it reflects. The Keyshot, in my view, handles even more faithfully the operation of lights than Mental Ray, for example. But in this case my problem is just this one, this decorative light doesn't appear in the mirror, as it does in the diffused or hyper-bright wall... Is there, how to get around this?

[RRIS]

That's just how mirrors work, they only show reflections. If you would create surface imperfections (dirt spots, dust, scuff marks, etc.) you would see the light cast by the spots, but it would be very clear that the mirror was dirty. You can test this by increasing the surface roughness of the mirror material. If you increase the roughness of the mirror material, then your cast light will start to appear (try values over 0.15).

In case I'm missing the point and you want to see your actual spot light objects in the mirror.. then you just need to add some bright self illuminating materials where the glass from your spotlight is to mimic the idea of it being illuminated (then put your light object directly underneath it (so it doesn't get blocked by the self illuminating glass).

Last thing that I just thought of.. try to switch on caustics and see what that does. It will enable light cast by your lights to get bounced by the mirror and get cast on other objects around it.

[RRIS]

Two images to explain a bit better my previous post:

First one without caustics. On the left a mirror with 0 roughness, on the right 0.13 roughness.

Second image with caustics. Mirror materials the same.

You can see the disc with an emissive material reflected in the mirrors. You also notice that the light cast on the mirror is only visible if the mirror has roughness.
And that light bounced by the mirror is only visible when caustics are enabled.

[leoangelozi]

Understood. Thanks for your feedback!!!!