do you use photometric lights with GI?

[Brian Cassil]

I've gone back and forth on this maybe 6 or 7 times, and I'm curious to know what others do. I like the photometric lights because I get better reflections with them but they also seem to wash out the scene more. It may be that I am doing something wrong though. I like the standard lights because for me they are more flexible, without having the dynamic range of photometrics my reflections never look quite right. Again, I could be doing something wrong.

 

Personally I use Final Render, but I would like to know from users of any renderer what kind of lights they use.

[Ricardo Eloy]

Well, I normally use photometric lights and never had a problem with them. They work well with VRay (although a bit slow) and very well with radiosity. Not only reflections look good, also the whole lighting gets smoother and way more natural.

I guess the trick is you have to treat them as you would treat real lights. I normally work in Lux instead of Candelas (all technical specifications I get are in Lux, so...) and they work sweet.

[rmoore97]

hey brian, we just started using photometric lights with finalrender where i work and really the only problems we have encountered is if you have the standard raytrace shadows set instead of fR raytrace shadows - then we have experienced crashes. other then that i love the photometric lights, and you can still cheat with them a little if you need to, by adjusting the multiplier, changing candelas or even using the exposure control.

 

randy

[Sawyer]

I have been using Chris Nichols' tip that he showed in the interiors DVD. I Use a photometric file creator. Their are way too many photometric files out their and most of the time I don't get specs on lights so I can fudge them this way. I would spend all day testing files till I found the ones I liked.

 

That all in vray.

[Ricardo Eloy]

I have been using Chris Nichols' tip that he showed in the interiors DVD. I Use a photometric file creator.

That sounds interesting. How does it work? I mean, I've seen people writing their own IES file, but I simply don't have what it takes to do it.

[Sawyer]

I have a program its called ies_gen3 its a free thing I found online. I am sure there are better ones. Chris used one in his dvd that looked better but I have forgotten it's name. Anyway you can just draw a profile of light, save it and use that as your web distribution file.

 

Here are some screen captures of the program, wire of the light and result.

[Ricardo Eloy]

Sweet! I'm gonna check it out. Thanks!