Questions on lights

[DatokerJ]

Several questions on lights!

the first and third are the most important as the third one, I think causes some lag issues from shining on everything!


First - How do I properly use softvolumes on lights? I added a softvol for 3 lights in the main hallway but it disables the shadows and light reflection on the avatar! and still causes it to shine on everything else

Second - How do I stop the lights from shining through on the other side of the objects, I got a texture mapped for my lights and it shines on floor and a bit of the walls, and when I'm outside I see the light plastered on the outside wall as well!

Third - How do I tell the lights what objects to shine on? or Not to shine on! the plugin appends the light to every object with shading enabled, from what I can tell!

Fourth - How do I prevent the light from shining upwards to the sky? the lights I'm using are spotlights and should only shine down "or so I thought"
I have spent hours tweaking these lights, They just DO NOT want to do anything you want/expect em to do

Thanks,
Dato,

[Jojon]

First - How do I properly use softvolumes on lights? I added a softvol for 3 lights in the main hallway but it disables the shadows and light reflection on the avatar! and still causes it to shine on everything else

This is normal. The softvolume only affects the avatar.

Second - How do I stop the lights from shining through on the other side of the objects, I got a texture mapped for my lights and it shines on floor and a bit of the walls, and when I'm outside I see the light plastered on the outside wall as well!

Lighting is, as you've noticed, not affected by obscuring objects. Well, not unless you allow the objects to cast shadows.

Third - How do I tell the lights what objects to shine on? or Not to shine on! the plugin appends the light to every object with shading enabled, from what I can tell!

Select all lights that you do NOT (IIRC) want to affect a particular material and add them to a group ( ctrl-G ). Then bring up the material's "shaders" tab: tick the "exclusive" button and enter the name of the group in the string gadget to the left of the button.

Fourth - Dunno. :)

[DatokerJ]

Thanks Jojon, That third one should help alot! That is if I can figure it out easy enough

Cheers
Dato

[DatokerJ]

Ok, I was not able to get the exclusive thing to do anything!

here is what I did! I grouped the 3 lamps together, Re-named the group, Selected the 3 Objects Materials I wanted the light to show up on, Hit the exclusive button, and added the Light Group name to the GR: Box under 'Materials/Shaders window.

The plugin still appends the light to every object. Perhaps I missed something along the way?

Thanks again!
Dato

[Jojon]

Hmm, I made a few quick tests, to make sure I have at least a passing clue, before opening my mouth again. :P

First of all, forget the "NOT" in my previous answer - that was wrong, my apologies.

What we have here... is failure.. to communicate. (sorry, couldn't let the opportunity slip by :P)

"Exclusive" in our case, means that the material will exclusively use the light sources in the group, not that the lamps are exclusive to the material, so yes; other stuff will still be lit by the lamps -- in order to leave that other stuff unaffected, you will have to restrict IT to another group of lights, that does not include your three indoors/i-don't-know-what lamps. :7

There are less cumbersome ways that could have been used to restrict lighting, but I believe the reason it's done this way, is to make things look as much alike, in Blender and Uru, as possible, which is especially useful if you intend to bake lightmaps.

It used to be the case, in ancient versions of pyPRP, that you had to assign lights manually to objects, through logic properties.


(One thing to keep in mind, is that it might be worth not giving lamps larger ranges than needed, to keep plasma from unnecessarily evaluating far away lamps.)

[DatokerJ]

Yeah I caught on to that communications error! Must say though I got lost on that for a few mins !

However I think grouping em is more trouble then its worth, that would mean all my object mats would either need to have exclusive lights or be shadeless!

But I do have an idea I'm gonna test out!
/me wonders if light will pass through shadeless materials!
I think I am gonna try to setup a simple face or cube with a transparent texture, set it to shadeless and see if that stops the light from passing through!

EDIT: Well, It was a nice try but that didn't work