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Lights overview
When creating a geometry from an external source file, lights are imported as well. They can't be created from scratch yet, only modified.
The light panel
Once the geometry is loaded, the list of associated lights is available under the Lights tab. A dedicated light panel can be opened by double clicking on a list item.
Opening the light panel
The lights can be of four types:
- Point: classical centric light (non physical).
- Sphere: physical light with a finite spherical surface.
- Area: physical light with an area surface.
- Other: all other lights that are not recognized by NDunes.
Point and sphere lights can have a spot angle and falloff restraining its lighting area.
The sphere and area lights implement a physical lighting model. Their intensity is set with a luminous flux in lumens and depends on their surface area.
An option of the panel allows to Illuminate the transparent meshes (transparent parts of the geometry and plants). Deactivating this option will speed up the rendering since the forward pipeline is quite performance-hungry.
Light shadows
Dynamic lights can have shadows via shadow maps. The shadows can be dynamic or static. Dynamic shadows are rendered at each frame whereas static shadows must be precomputed.
Note:
Currently only point light with a spot angle can have dynamic shadows.
Several properties are accessible in the light panel:
- shadow map size in pixels;
- shadow map blur in pixels;
- shadow bias.
To precompute the static shadows, click on the shadows button in the geometry toolbar. The tool will calculate the shadows of all the lights of the geometry that have been flagged as "Static".
Compute the lights static shadows
The static shadows of all the lights of the geometry are stored in a single .red file. The file location is visible on top of the Light tab of the geometry panel.
Note:
Baked lights shadows are automatically handled by the baking.
Light IES support
NDunes supports IES data for lights. If IES data is associated to the light, the IES checkbox of the light panel will be checked.
When the IES stretch property is checked, the IES data are remapped between 0 and the spot angle. Otherwise they are mapped between 0 and PI and clamped at the spot angle.
The lights with IES are automatically physical and the intensity is set with a luminous flux.
 Adding reflections | Materials overview |
