IES lights now showing in scene

[philvanderloo]

I think I've exhausted every possible solution. My IES lights are not showing up, or functioning in my scene. I opened another project created for a tutorial and duplicated every render setting, every camera setting, and every IES light setting, including profiles, and I have not been able to get my lights to work, (or even exist) in my scene. What else should I be looking for?

Thank you

[Nicolai Bongard]

From my experience when dealing with IES lights, the usual suspect is strength of the light, usually you have to set it really high (higher than one might expect) for them to "show up". The amount differs from IES profile to IES profile. But it sounds pretty strange that you do not get the correct result when you are following a tutorial. Perhaps make sure they are not on a layer that does not render? If what you mean by "exist in your scene" is that you do not get an object in your scene that you can select, it sounds like you are working on a layer that is hidden?

[Ismael]

Three possibilities:

 

1) Assigning an IES and not attaching an IES light distribution profile.

 

2) Improper settings of a Vray Physical Camera.

 

3) Wrong System Units

 

Extra read:

 

http://www.pfbreton.com/2009/08/when-photometric-data-goes-wrong/

[philvanderloo]

Nicolai,

To clarify a little bit- the tutorial I was comparing to is the finished product of an IES lighting tutorial finished by someone else and the lights all show up fine.

So I matched every single setting, (render setup, light type, settings, and IES profile, environment settings, camera settings), between my file and the finished tutorial. And the IES lights do not show up at all in the render in my file.

They do show in the scene and I can select them. They just don't render.

Ismael, thank you. I'll look into your link.

[Nicolai Bongard]

This sounds pretty strange. To narrow down what might cause the problem, you could perhaps try to merge the tutorial file, and only select the camera and the IES lights from that file, place them in your scene and see if they work. That way at least you can find out if there are some other settings somewhere that causes the problem, or if it is something you have missed when setting up the camera and lights.

[philvanderloo]

Well this ended up being one of those weird things that I'll just never understand. Even though my IES light was a foot below the ceiling and I moved it up and down a dozen times while trying to figure this out, I just moved it down another foot and all of the sudden it worked.