Octane Spotlight

[Joseph]

When creating live renderings, I often find myself having problems with beams of light. In LED-fixtures the light is really coming from all of the led-cells, but in Vectorworks beams starts from specific point inside the fixture. So, for example in Mac Aura or Clay Paky B-Eye, the beam does not seem to start from the lense, but from the center of it. Is there a way to fix this?

Essentially the individual led sources in a fixture create a single beam. To help give the appearance of light emanating from across the whole LED array, I have started applying a glow texture to a "lens" in my symbols. This is classed separately and can be turned on or off as necessary. I'll try and post an example when I have a bit more time.

Contained in the light info record there is a field named "Lens". Currently this unused in all the symbols that I know of but clearly VW has some plan or other for that at some stage. Perhaps @Rob Bookscould enlighten us!

This is how we have created all of our in house symbols. Having the lens classed separately allows you to set your Spotlight preferences to allow for the lens to change color based on the color specified for the symbol.

As to the OP, if you are producing still images for proposals you can completely ditch the Spotlight functionality and manually add multiple light sources to the symbol to approximate the desired look. It is critical that your light symbols use a texture for the body and lens that do no cast shadows so that you can place the light source INSIDE the symbol. Lighting instruments in the Spotlight library use this type of texture.

Currently, Renderworks is EXTREMELY limited in how you can display volumetric "beams of light". There is truly no usable control of this property. The only way to make the beam originate at the size of the aperture from which it is emenating is to either move the light source further back into the light (depending on camera orientation I have actually placed light sources well behind lighting fixtures) or use multiple light sources. Also note that in it's current state, renderwork's lighting beams only originate from a pinpoint and the width of the beam determines the beam's apparent brightness. In other words, the beam starts off non-existent and then gets brighter as it gets wider which is precisely NOT how light behaves in the real world.

That is true, however, the real issue is whether or not Maxon will allow the necessary control over light objects. The functionality is there, VW users simply do not have access to it. To exacerbate the issue, that kind of control WAS available seven years ago prior to moving to the current rendering engine.

While addressing all 3 would be VERY welcome, the last 2 have been repeated complaints/concerns/questions for several years and are in dire need of attention. With all due respect, I find it more than a little odd that users of software otherwise as powerful as VW are being driven to other solutions to get more realistic renderings in this regard - especially, when some of this functionality USED to be there and when potential/probable options are in the same corporate family.

- my assumption is that I would create all the geometry in VW then export to C4D and add textures and lighting there. The issue occurs when you need to start revising a project. Then you have to determine how to go back to VW, make changes, then I suppose merge those changes into C4D and then make all the necessary updates to lighting and texturing. Very clunky.

Well not to add to your frustration Scott, but the work flow you describe is what I do daily. I model in VW, move to Cinema and use Octane to render. Here's the rub - volumetric lights don't work in Octane. In fact, Octane doesn't even ship with a spotlight - there is a 3rd Party add on (see Brograph.com), but it's not ideal. You can create an overall fog, but it is very hard to control and very hard to get looking correct. And - it takes ages to get noise free renders - like stupid long (and I have a very powerful machine). So I'd look at this workflow more carefully, I gave up on it for light beams. You might consider Cinema 4D with the STAGE plug in and forgo Octane for this. To be clear - native Cinema has lighting volumetrics, though very basic, but Octane is a different animal. I end up doing my volumetrics mostly in Photoshop or After effects using the Optical Flares plug in from Video Copilot, but I do stills, not animation, previz or preprograming. Examples on my website. Happy to talk about this more offline - I have spent a fair amount of time studying rendering of light beams for concerts.

The instrumentation is amazing, impeccable and just perfect. The high-octane direction made by Ryan, Harold, and TAK is just amazing. It just felt surreal and on par with the current J-Pop scene. The bridge is particularly breathtaking. That electric guitar hook, vocal progression, and synth work is beyond universal. It is just amazing!

The outro is just sonically gripping, ecstatically nirvana and just pure power pop. The intro was just what got me into the song. It was already interesting and gripping. Just fascinating hearing and feeling this. The chorus while not really that accessible and maybe even jarring, as an Electronic addict, I was just blown away. It was the perfect element of variability, creativity and stability.

The production was just impressive, supersonic, high-octane, and unheard of. It reminds me of J-Pop and it just feels like an amalgamation of sorts. I just was blown away, the second that beat started kicking in. It was a saving grace of March for me. This song just single handedly saved the whole month for me.

Baking to a .lightMap or .aoMap is more expensive to render than an unlit material, but allows you to keep some aspects of the lighting dynamic, and can look better than MeshStandardMaterial alone. For example, ambient occlusion gives soft shadows affected only by ambient/diffuse lights, like THREE.AmbientLight, and something like a spotlight pointed into areas with AO will hide those shadows.

To add to @donmccurdy awesome answer, you can generally achieve different/more effects by using some combination of these maps. For example, you could be tiling a normal map several times across some surface, but then map a single tile for the diffuse/albedo (maybe it has some logo, but the whole surface should be bumpy like leather). When you consider a lightmap, it covers large surfaces like ceilings, walls, rooms, or terrain etc. You could cover all the walls with one repetitive stucco texture at 512x512. But if you want to get some detail in your light map, you need a lot of texture space to uniquely cover all the surfaces. So even at say 4096x4096 you would not get the same texel size on the wall as you would if you repeated the 512x512 texture many times.

Imagine this on terrain, your lightmap may struggle to capture shadow details from a fence for example. Even a shadow from a tree would be somewhat low res. Could you even display a texture of grass or dirt at this resolution? No, you would lose most detail.

Initially intended only to consist of five issues, the series evolved into an intermittent "ongoing" of sorts until the end of 2009, at which point it was shelved. One additional issue, Spotlight: Prowl, was published in April 2010. The series returned for a final six issues starting in December 2012 as part of a tie-in with the Generations toyline.

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