As requested by some of you guy’s a quick Photometric light setup…
ok …ive just made a simple box room with a couple of shelve’s in so you can see the light distribution.
1 : in the top view add a photometric free piont light in the position that you need it (make sure you do it in the top view so when the ies data comes in its round the right way).
2 : move the light up into the position of where your going to put your model of you spot light. at this stage the light is still round …meaning that it has no ies data attached to it, so if you was to render at this stage the light would almost act like an omni light and have light coming out all around it.
3 : Time to add the ies data to the light.
right click on the link and save target.
4 : Select your light and go to the modify stack, there you will see a label called Distribution, choose Web, once you do that you will get another rollout called Web Parameters, click on where it say’s Web file and choose the ies file that you downloaded.
As the file is loaded you will notice that the shape of the light will change from round to a rain drop shape… this is because the light now has the data writen in to the ies file or the Distribution data file… you can see from the shape of the light where the light is going
hit render and see what you get.
copy the light into the spot light positions or where you want light to be…
you can adjust the intensity as you would pretty much a normal light…
like everything you will have to play with these lights but you do get a real world light distribution which looks very cool…
The lines you see in the light pattern are actually caustics generated by probabely some kind of glass, plastic or metal material that is around the original light source. But since this data is stored into the ies there are no real caustics needed.
Which makes me wonder. Would it not be possible for an exceptionally clever programmer, to make an utility for converting a model with a light source into an ies web file. Maybe by calculating the bounces and shadows through glass lenses and other fixture features one has meticulously modelled, including caustics, this data should be able to describe the ies distribution web. Anyone?
Kind of “baking” the caustics into a IES file fom a fixture model? That would be really interesting. An IES file doesn’t seem too complicated, the translation is what seems tricky. Maybe we’ll see a tool for this sometime soon…
