Point lights not working.

# 1 22-01-2017 , 04:09 PM

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I figured the body lines out and went to set up a test render with point lights and all I get is a dark screen. Everything is set correctly and correct shaders as well. I checked photons and have quadratic for decay (default). They light up but just barely, just enough to barely see and I have two with colors changed to white and intensity all the way up. Even scaled giant they still won't light anything correctly. I've turned lights on/off, turned default light on/off and checked render settings a few times and there is no reason for them not to light than I can find. I even did an uninstall/reinstall to see if that would correct the issue and it didn't. I can't find the tick box for checking "render all objects" so I don't know if that's it or not. I cleaned up the outliner etc. Any ideas or help would be appreciated. It's only point lights doing this too, all other lights light up...

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# 2 22-01-2017 , 07:33 PM

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how far is the quadratic turned up??? Quadratic is not default in Maya. The decay rate will be based from Intensity over distance. Just turning the light up to 10 will not be enough necessarily because of the distance the light may be away from your objects

Ive attached a pic of what I mean, you can see the distance of the lights to the object, it isnt far at all. You just need to really turn the lights up

hope this helps

Jay

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# 3 23-01-2017 , 01:00 AM

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Yep! The light intensity slider is soft capped at 10 which is woefully low for any kind of realistic lighting (assuming that's what you're after) so you'll have to manually input something much higher. I like to start with an absurd value lol.

- Genny
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# 4 24-01-2017 , 02:42 PM

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Yes, Jen..lol. I'd forgotten that there was an adjustment in the att. editor. (been a long time for lights for me, at least in maya..lol.) Now though I've got little black artifacts all over the model, sort of looks like noise scattered here and there. All I did was drop on a mia material-x. I noticed they only show up with the lights though.

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Last edited by cj74; 24-01-2017 at 02:46 PM.

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# 5 25-01-2017 , 02:56 AM

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What kind of shadows is the light generating? Those look like depth mapped shadow artifacts.

- Genny
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# 6 25-01-2017 , 01:01 PM

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What kind of shadows is the light generating? Those look like depth mapped shadow artifacts.

Originally Posted by Gen

Yep, you're correct, they were depth mapped. I ticked them off and they went away. Thanks Gen!

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# 7 26-01-2017 , 06:02 AM

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Yeah I'd go with raytraced shadows since they're more physically accurate than depth mapped, unless that's some kind of filler light that doesn't need to cast shadows at all (I don't know what kind of lighting setup you're going for).

- Genny
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# 8 26-01-2017 , 04:22 PM

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Yeah I'd go with raytraced shadows since they're more physically accurate than depth mapped, unless that's some kind of filler light that doesn't need to cast shadows at all (I don't know what kind of lighting setup you're going for).

Originally Posted by Gen

Just a simple 3-point system, nothing special.

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Point lights not working.

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