Putting light in a box

[jeffw]

I am trying to get light inside a metal storage box. The material is brushed stainless steel and these boxes are always way too dark regardless of the environment and I have always had to correct it in photoshop. I was hopeful the new lighting feature would help for this so I brought in a model plane and made it into light source and angled it a bit towards the dark surfaces. It does not seem to behave like I would think a large illuminated surface would and give a broad even light. If I increase the brightness then the bright spots are too hot. Any suggestions?

[guest84672]

Jeff - first off you are not using any new lighting features, but the emissive material. Try and use the "area diffuse light", turn on "global illumination" in the the settings tab. Then edit the advanced settings for the material, and turn off "visible to camera" and "visible in reflections".

This should do the trick.

[jeffw]

I did what you suggested and while it is better that the settings I had there seems no difference between having the light on or off. See screenshots.

[guest84672]

Then turn "visible in reflection" back on.

[jeffw]

Worse.

[guest84672]

It looks like that there is no light coming off the plane. Note your units are in meters. So you really need to increase the power of the light to get the lighting effect (after all it is physically accurate. Also scale down the plane so it only lights the inside of the rotisserie.

[jeffw]

I adjusted the size of the plane to inside the box and put it up to 1000 watts which is the maximum. Still no light seems to come off the plane. I left visible to eye on just so you could see the plane. It makes no difference on or off to the lighting. I turned off visible in reflections as it was even darker.

[guest84672]

You may need to type in 10,000 or an even higher number. Keep in mind you are working in meters.

[jeffw]

I think something else is at play here. I put in 500,000 watts and still nothing. I also checked my SolidEdge model that was imported and the units are in inches not meters.

[guest84672]

Scene information above says meters.

But you are correct - can't get it to work either. Will investigate.

[jeffw]

Ok, thanks.

Maybe you could answer one question. What is the difference in the position tab between the xyz scale and the scale slider since they are not the same. My slider says scale of 7 while my xyz scale says a scale of 1. The manual does not seem to address this difference.

[guest84672]

Ok - it's a bug. We will fix it.

As far as scale goes - one is overall scale of the model, while the other scale is the relative scale of the object, taking the overall scale as the basis.

I hope this makes sense.