Is this possible ? Soften edges on area lights

[hve]

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

[PerFotoVDB]

+100! Very much needed
+
barndoor control

[TGS808]

You can do it by attaching a color gradient texture to the Area Light node.

[hve]

Thank you will check that out !

[hve]

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

[hve]

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

[hve]

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

[Anindo Ghosh]

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.   

[hve]

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