I have tried alpha masked png’s but Enscape does not like emitter billboards, I cannot seem to achieve a satisfactory result, has anyone succeeded in something similar?
Looks like you will need to get creative and create a 2nd pass for post. Just break it down into what you need for that pass and create the model and materials to make just that. Not ideal but will get you there for now.
Try to model a cone with a constant emissive value. Than use a gradient opacity texture to make him 30% opaque at the top and down to 0% at the ground. Should look like what you intend.
I hope you guys are setting it up differently than me because I would love for this to work. Using 2.5, I just tried what I think you are saying (using opacity texture with emissive material) but it is not working well. See attached. This is similar to the results I had in previous versions which led me to give up on this approach.
As you can see the emissive amount does not vary with the amount of opacity as determined by the transparency texture. There is a cut off where areas of 50% or greater opacity are uniformly emissive, and areas 50% or less opacity are not emissive at all.
When I apply a texture that goes from 30% to 0% I see zero emissiveness throughout.
Are your results different than this? If so, please share your method of setting up your material.
Analyzing this picture, it seems like there is dust or smoke in the air. You COULD try to model an actually volume of smoke or dust and apply the true lumen values and IES files into the lights fixtures. I doubt it would work well, but could be worth trying.
Enscape does have built in godrays, but for real godrays to appear, light has to hit something physical: water droplets, dust, etc.
These lights work in conjunction with a smoke machine in reality, i know in other unbiased render engines one needs to use a global medium to achieve this effect and it comes at a huge price of time as it renders very slow. However. there are ways to fake it using alpha based png’s, this fakery is what I am attempting, problem is Enscape material emitters do not like gradients like this, so i was hoping for another trick, or to get the gradient bug fixed.
Transparencies have always been on/off and I’ve never work managed to get them to work with emissive materials: I’ve only ever managed to get a smooth blend by using a b&w mesh. You can try this…
This used to work with past releases, here is an example of when it worked, I think this was about 15 months ago, just uploaded this video today, as show has already aired so okay to show, See light beams, they worked just fine in the past, now it’s just a solid beam of light, before it showed a gradient.