Area Light "Barn Doors"

[im.thatoneguy]

It would be nice if there was an option to leave an area light as soft but affect its falloff angle. The real world film equivalent is a "flag" or 'barn door' on the light. Each of the 4 sides could be controlled individually so that the light is directed in a particular direction but the light itself is not directional. I'm currently modeling boxes and parenting them to lights and making them shadow casting but invisible to camera. This starts to create problems in a number of situations not to mention it's enormously inconvenient. The current solution of having "Focus" Is akin to having "Egg crates" on a soft light bank. I don't want to lose this functionality but I would like the alternate (and by far most popular) method of controlling a real light on set.

In an ideal world it would have 4 controls: Top, Bottom, Left and Right angles. On top of those there would be a softness slider which would be the digital equivalent of lengthening one of the barn doors. Lastly there would be a "team" checkbox to slave all of sliders together to easily adjust all 4 at once.

[piotrus3333]

what about gradient on directional vray plane light? or 4 softbox textures blended?

[im.thatoneguy]

None of those produce the same effect which is to say "Fully soft" but also limited in its domain. I whipped up a quick example demonstrating the difference in lighting characteristics. Note how the light wrapps around more softly and the shadows are obviously much softer on the flagged version, but I'm also controlling the falloff of the region in a very similar fashion. Controlling the character of light is essential to cinematography. I find it ironic having to fight this battle since in the Brazil 2 days I was always pushing for adding a directionality option haha and was explaining the differences from the opposite direction.

[Dave_Wortley]

Yeah I'm with you on this Gavin, the Directionality of a light in VRay has always bugged me, it never seemed to mimic the properties of barn doors, it's more akin to having a laser on full spread and then focusing it. With the barn doors you get a bit of bouncing that diffusing slightly on the edges whilst keeping the center focused. I tried once making a honeycomb filter in VRay to try make that effect but it didn't focus the light as I hoped, I'm not sure if I put reflective Caustics on but it would have needed them.

What I think we need is a way to artistically define IES profiles in a way which means we can have focused light. How we communicate that however is quite tricky. Vlado said we should just use an IES editor outside of VRay and load it in using the VRayIES Light but I'd love to have a way inside 3dsmax to do it and have control to play interactively. Not sure what that UI would look like at the moment, but I'm happy to have a think about it.

[soulburn3d]

Highly agree, check out this other thread on the subject:

http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...-for-Vraylight

And some extra info I threw together:

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_tools/...ot_falloff.htm

- Neil

[^Lele^]

I have been lobbying for even more control for a while now.
I would love to be able to attach a falloff volume to a light, which i could choose to orient in three different spaces: light, world, and camera.
It would offer controls to govern falloff, it would allow for a number of procedural shapes (cylinder, cone, box, sphere/ellipse), and would act as a multiplier for the incoming lighting of the corresponding light(s).
Further, i would love to have a Gobo plane, fully texturable, and it too ought to be able to align to the three different spaces, so to allow for greater control of subtle lighting.
Imagine such a gobo attached to a dome, aligned to the camera view plane, with its influence texture being painted in real time: you'd be painting lighting in your viewport.

[vfxronin]

i know its a bit late but i would like to top up the vote on this. i was on a show i recently finished in V-ray for nuke ( i know I'm on a 3d Smax page) and i really need to this features. i ended up cheating a lot of it, but it would had been handy to have.