How render with photometric lights in Blender 3D and LuxRender
In the last few days I’m playing around with LuxRender 0.6 RC3 a lot. I was testing some of the features of this incredible unbiased render engine for Blender 3D, and decided to write a short article about a feature that every architectural visualization artist needs to know: photometric lights. With LuxRender we can use photometric lights to add light sources to the scene, based on physical properties of light, which will result in a very realistic image.
The photometric lights consist of a file with an IES extension. In LuxRender we can link a material to one of those files and make an object emit light using this information. For this tutorial I will use a test scene to show the effects of this light, which is this one:
As result of the rendering with a photometric light we will have an image like this:
This is a result of a few hours of rendering, and I know it could use some adjustments at the textures and overall scene, but it’s only a test render.
If you want to use this feature of LuxRender, here is what you have to do. The first thing is use a small 3d object as a light emitter, like a plane. In my scene I have used small planes with the normals pointing towards the direction in which the light should be cast.
Apply a material to the planes and open the material tab in LuxBlend. There we have to set this material as a light and just turn on the Photometric Diagram button. It will turn on the use of IES lights, and then a small selector will let us choose an IES file to use in the scene.
For the light setup that’s pretty much it. At the Cam/Env tab I have set the environment to none, since the light should be only emitted by the photometric lights.
Now, setup a place to save the renderings and choose a resolution. Press the render button and wait until the image is clear enough to go into post-production.
This a really important tool for architectural visualization artists and can help a lot, if you have to work on a night scene or with the simulation of artificial illumination.
Related posts:
- How to use IES lights in YafaRay and Blender 3d for interior design An experimental version of the next version of YafaRay was...
- Volumetric rendering for interior visualization with Blender and LuxRender The use of atmospheric effects and tools such as volume...
- How to use alpha maps to render trees in LuxRender and Blender 3D Since I wrote an article suggesting a collection of free...
- Controlling lights with LuxRender Light groups There are a lot of great features and tools in...
- Quick guide on how to setup IES files for rendering in Indigo Renderer For architectural visualization artists, no matter what type of renderer...
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
In the last few days, I have been really impressed by the maturity of Luxrender so far. It has become my favorite renderer, surpassing Indigo and Mosaic by miles. Great tutorial.