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Where I work they have developed an interesting tool that allows for the creation of a mesh light by drawing the outline of its reflection directly onto a surface. The tool then calculates angles of reflectance and creates a mesh light that produces the desired reflected shape. It's pretty cool, but often results in some crazy shaped pieces of geo as the mesh light. It got me wondering how decay would be calculated from such a surface, as although the desired reflected shape in the rendering object is often quite clean, the mesh light itself is often all over the place, and at various points very different distances from the surface. So far as illumination goes, what are the potential implications for decay? Is decay from a mesh light calculated by point on surface?
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Lights' decay is calculated on the basis of the solid angle under which the light source is visible from any given point of the lightened surface, which angle is approximately equal to the inverse square of the distance from any point of the light source to the lightened surface. You can view a graph illustrating the Inverse Square Law here: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...Ray+Mesh+Light -
So, in simple terms (for someone like me who isn't that technical!), decay will be correctly calculated based on the actual shape of a mesh light, so even if the reflection of a mesh light appears to be e.g. a regular rectangle, if the shape of the mesh itself is some other totally random shape with greatly varying per-surface-point distances from the rendering object, decay will be calculated accordingly?Comment
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Yes, it will be correctly calculated.Comment
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