CompuServe Messages

#Lighting weirdness

    30-May-95 14:38:14
Sb: #Lighting weirdness
Fm: Darin Beard 76002,3671
To: GreG tsadilas 74774,232
GreG- I ran across a situation that I can't figure out. I was trying to model a street light of sorts and this is how it went. I created the main lamp part (metal or whatever) and then added a sphere for the globe containing the bulb. I made the sphere bright and added an axis inside the sphere and made it a light source (point light, casting shadows, controlled falloff). When I rendered it using SCANLINE everything was fine, it gave off a nice soft glow under the lamp, but in TRACE mode I guess the sphere caused the light source to not be seen due to the shadowcasting. I then deleted the axis light source and made the sphere (globe) itself the lightsource. It still did not cast light in TRACE mode. And in SCANLINE mode it casts some strange looking pattern on the ground. Is there a way to put a lightsource inside a globe-like thing and still have shadows casting from that light? I tried moving the light source outside the globe but the shadows are strange and unnatural looking. I ended up rebuilding the lamp without a globe at all and it does fine now, but I still would like to know if "realistic" lights can be built like I described above. I hope this made sense. Thanks Darin