Lights (lack of) when rendering in Lightworks

[Anonymous]

I am running a night time rendering using the Lightworks' engine and am having trouble getting lights to work.

I have searched through a number of threads with very good tips (dwight of course) which was helpful but nothing regarding lights not working.

They are turned on on the object itself, I have varied the intensities and on rendering, the 'lamps' are turned on but still I get but a faint glow from the lights.

the particular lights I was using was the 'runway lights' from the lampworld library, when this didn't work I thought I would put down a 'general light source' and still no light.

Can anyone shed some LIGHT on this problem, am I going mad or have I just forgotten to do something basic?

[Dwight]

D McD:

start out all lights at half power with no falloff. Lightworks seems to have dramatic falloff.....

[__archiben]

Dwight wrote:
... much like post-industrial coal dust laden Somerset skies.

i grew up 'round them there parts and never knew . . .

~/archiben

[Dwight]

just kidding.`

I am almost certain they never made steel in Somerset.

It was a bad excuse for a murky sky - the situation seemed to call for it.

[__archiben]

Dwight wrote:
It was a bad excuse for a murky sky - the situation seemed to call for it.

ah! the haze as seen through the eyes of a cidered-up farm-hand?

[Dwight]

oh. peat bog fires, then?
What's the name of that spire on the nodule?

[__archiben]

Dwight wrote:
oh. peat bog fires, then?
What's the name of that spire on the nodule?

glastonbury tor? . . burrow mump? they're more towery than spirery . . .

[Anonymous]

Dwight

Thanks for looking at that, the layers appear confused but at least it shows that it can be done, you're description of the process being the important bit! I will have another go and post the result.

I still think there is one thing lacking and that is that it appears that you need a surface for light to fall on, to see a light, just having a light shining upwards in the dark doesn't give a beam of light. This has the effect of the light radiating from the surface it is falling on and none from the actual source of the light?

P.S. sat by fire burning peat(ah the smell) and drinking cider(or as we say zider!)

[Dwight]

Excuse the rant, but how does this work in the real world? You see light in glass because of refraction and reflection. In real world terms, grime falls on glass, making it more "visible" - nothing is as perfect as in the model....

The other thing is that every real situation has many lights meticulously focused on many parts of the scene. We would be overwhelmed with light sources if this were the case in the model, so we cheat with fewer lights, but they still must be carefully placed for effect.

My expereince that glass canopies are usualy glared-out when the sky is black, so we need to find a time of day - usually right after sunset - where there's enough light in the sky to help model the elements, yet it is dark enough for their inner light to glow....

Lighting a canopy is difficult, but when a thing is hard to model in the computer, it is going to present a challenge in the real world. This challenge points out the problem you'll have using real light to model the individual glass panels...... perhaps the panels themselves need to be tinted......

you can have the light cones show in the rendering - as cheezy as that is, but we still can't make particles in the atmosphere...

[Karl Ottenstein]

Karl wrote:
Tried some window lights ...last night, and couldn't get much illumination from them. Finally, I changed the color to white and intensity to 100% and with no other lights (so that I could see what contribution was being made), there was almost no light generated at all.

What's the trick to getting the window lights to add observable / meaningful illumination? I suppose I should open the objects and dig around...

Well, the trick was that I came across a so-far-non-reproducible bug. Closing AC and starting over with a fresh file and just a 'cavern' created with walls/slabs to test the lights I again found this behavior of almost no light emission ... but then they began to work properly. No idea what the problem was... just went from almost no light to tons of light at the same settings.

On a related matter, in case this has not come up in the forum: don't use 8.1 lights with LW in 9.0. They don't have the LW falloff code in them. For example, the "General Light" object from 8.1 will honor the max-light-distance parameter with the internal engine, but with LW, light illuminates surfaces far in the distance. The light with the same name from the 9.0 library has the LW falloff code (which nevertheless operates differently than you would expect from the parameters of the object, which indicate that light should not extend beyond a fixed distance.)

Back to it...

Karl

[Dwight]

Thanks Karl. I ran into that at the beginning..... and was painfully reminded of the problem recently when opening a file that accessed the wrong [old] library and substituted may objects with old ones, lights included. AAAArgh!!!