Spotlights!

[jaxtone]

I made some race car spotlights about 10 years ago. Used an old LW technique...

(I made two transparent cones. Sized them up in one end so they looked like megaphones. Added a transparency gradient map and lit each cone up by a spotlight inside each one of them. I was really jealous at guys working in other 3D-softwares that just added a spotlight and told it where to shine.)

This old fashioned way of doing it maybe lead to a laughs nowadays but since I haven´t found a better way doing this I thought it would be a good idea asking if any other user found a better way to create nice spotlights in Lightwave!

P.S. I have tried volumetric alternatives but they damage fields of grass I´ve created in Saslite. Anywhere the volumetric spotlight shines the grass becomes invisible. I also experience that it´s more or less impossible to limit the end size of the volumetric spotlights diameter since it seems to increase it´s size when you want it to cast longer light volume. It´s not optional for a car spotlight to be enormously big in Y and X direction.

[johncmurphy]

it´s more or less impossible to limit the end size of the volumetric spotlights diameter since it seems to increase it´s size when you want it to cast longer light volume.
Control the length of the light's throw using the Range/Nominal Distance setting on the spotlight's Properties panel. Control the diameter using the Spotlight Cone Angle setting on the same panel.

[jaxtone]

Thanks John!

Do you or anyone else know how come that items made by Saslite such as grass dissappears when Volumetric Lights are added to a scene?

Control the length of the light's throw using the Range/Nominal Distance setting on the spotlight's Properties panel. Control the diameter using the Spotlight Cone Angle setting on the same panel.

[dballesg]

Thanks John!

Do you or anyone else know how come that items made by Saslite such as grass disappears when Volumetric Lights are added to a scene?

Thinking of the top of my head I will suspect it is due to SasLite being a pixel filter and Spotlights being calculated as volumes. Maybe the volume of the light it is calculated first affecting the pixels that SasLite will modify to create the grass???

Have you seen this technique by Pavlov to create grass using planes and procedural textures?

interesting technique (http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=100274&page=7)

Maybe you could try to use that one and volumetric spotlights?

David

[dwburman]

The last time I did volumetric lights, I rendered them at 1/2 res and added them to the render in After Effects.