Lua lighting for florescent lights..

[Chiblue]

I have a model that represents 3 florescent lights tubes strung in a line, I want to use then to light my scene but do not know how to script my Lua for the object to make them appear to light the area like florescent tubes.

 

Can anyone make a suggestion, I have tried to use all types of lights in LE but cannot get the look and feel I want, a point light is the closest but I want in affect a point light the length of the tube?

[Laurens]

I believe what you are looking for is called an area light and afecelis requested it at one point although I do not know what came of it. Maybe you can dig something up by searching for "area light".

 

Cheers!

[AggrorJorn]

You can look at the cage light. It has glowing material and a point light added via script.

[Pixel Perfect]

You can look at the cage light. It has glowing material and a point light added via script.

That's exactly how I did it in this scene:

 

[Chiblue]

That's exactly how I did it in this scene:

 

 

Now we are tooking good stuff, thanks buddy...

[Rick]

That's what you said wasn't working for you? You said 1 pointlight wasn't giving you what you wanted, but that's what they are saying they are doing. Now you are confusing me

[cassius]

Its the glowing material that does the trick.

[Chiblue]

That's what you said wasn't working for you? You said 1 pointlight wasn't giving you what you wanted, but that's what they are saying they are doing. Now you are confusing me

 

And it is not, I just did this and it basically gives me what I had with the point light, I thought maybe I am missing something... sorry... I am still getting the point light reflection from the ceiling... this is what I do not want... see attached..

 

In the image notice the point light on the ceiling, I want this to look like the light splatter from the tube not a point...

[macklebee]

for the size of that light I would probably use at least two pointlights and also set the gloss of the ceiling's texture low to achieve better surface scattering of the light...

[Pixel Perfect]

I went back and looked at mine and I in fact used spotlights (which are also cheaper to render) but I have a full reflector fitting around my florescent tubes which prevents any light from being cast upwards and reflecting off the ceiling; even if I were using point lights. Mac's suggestion sounds the most plausible given your situation.

[Chiblue]

I played around with using multiple point lights on the object model, after many different scenarios, what I found to be the best all round look that I wanted was to use a point light and position it a short distance beneath the light model, and have no lights attached to the model, this allows me to move the light up and down to get the glow I wanted.. I also change the light model not to cast shadows, so that the point light gave a glow on the ceiling.

 

I also tried to add the point light to the objects lua script and set a parameter so that I could position the light within the settings for the model, but I could not get this to work, I seems that the light position can only be set during initialization of the model class not afterward, unless anyone else has done this and can provide a point light script to show how to do it?

 

thanks for all the suggestion..

[Flexman]

Short of making your own shader that's about as much as you can do I think.

 

The book ShaderX5 covers something like this in the (small) section named "A Simple Area Light Model for GPUs by Aick in der Au". He implements a Blinn and Phong lighting equation for rectangular area lights. Probably too much for what you want but I mention it in case you're really serious.

[Chiblue]

Thanks, I will take a look at that Book, I am interested in shaders and the only shader infomration I have is form the Open GL bible.

 

I did play around trying to create a shader for this, but I do not know how to apply that shader to a scene in Editor, I believe someone said earlier or in a different post, that the lights are hard coded within the Editor so we cannot easily add new lights. We can only create variations of the basic lights available.

[Chiblue]

Just wanted to say thanks for the help on this, I finally got the affects I was looking for... see attached..

[Flexman]

Glad to hear it, and it looks really great too. Nice glow.