I can’t get light blockers to work in my scene - any thoughts?

[Bruce_Pynchon]

I’ve tried box, plane, etc - I’ve scaled it from small to huge, intersecting my model, in front, behind - I’ve tried placing in front of my lights. Nothing works. Figuring maybe it was a scaling issues I cranked the density up to an insane number and still nothing. Any thoughts? I’ve got a skylight and four lights in my scene - is it because of the skylights? My exposure is ~15 to 20 per light. Sorry if this isn’t enough info

[damaggio]

We don't have the scene.

[Bruce_Pynchon]

The file is above 70 MB, here's a Google drive file- does this work? https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dVd--EmS4wSOX2AauZoS5kCzE-eYQ1c6/view?usp=sharing

I'm not sure how to share it 

[Bruce_Pynchon]

@damaggio please let me know if there's another method to send through the scene- thank you so much!

[mspeer · Accepted solution]

Hi!

The light filter under transform1 works fine.

Just set Ramp to "0" for testing purposes. (You can reduce Density back to "1").

The other light filter is not connected to any light. You can't just duplicate a light filter, you need to connect it to every light that should be affected by this filter.

[Bruce_Pynchon]

Ah, that makes sense insofar as you have to connect them to a light- does that mean I should be connecting one to every light including the skylight if I'm trying to block light on say my chest or chin and cast shadows?

[Kahylan]

Hi!

I'm not quite sure what you are trying to achieve. I'm guessing by "light blocking" you mean having an object infront of your character that throws a shadow on him. Correct?

First off. Get rid of the Skydome light. Skydomes are great for lighting outdoor scenes or for evenly lighting an entire scene uniformly for turntables and such. But they are terrible for characterlighting. Also the reason your objects don't cast a shadow on your character is that the skydome drowns out all the other lights and shoots rays past the objects that you want to project shadows.

The Light "Front_Right_Blue" which you want to block, isn't even really aiming at your character.

This is what the light looks like when you turn all other lights off:

 If you aim it at the character, and move the object closer (try to have objects that should throw a clear shadow as close as possible to the object they throw it on when using defuse lightsources), results start to look a lot better fast:

 I personally prefere it to add in one light at a time, from most to least important, that way it is a lot easier to manage.

Also, just as a tip, I would not use 2K resolution to do my lighting. 500 x 500 is more than enough to see the general influence the lights have and is a lot faster in the IPR. You can still turn up the resolution to fine tune,once your lights look good in a lower resolution render.

I hope this helps!

[Bruce_Pynchon]

Thank you so much for this thorough reply! My intention was to cast a shadow or dull the light on parts of the face as well as the outfit so it wasn't as uniformly bright across the portrait but also . I recognize that with the skylight its probably overpowering everything - think is, that skylight as opposed to a bunch of other HDRIs I tried makes the skin look so much better. Here's a quick render of where I'm at: https://ibb.co/V2vnTmw

@Kahylan 

[Kahylan]

Ah I see, if you have an HDRI on the skydome it is different. Because on my end it was just drowning out everything, but that makes sense now.^^

The problem you still have with throwing a shadow is that the skydome is lighting past that object and is still the dominant light.

What you could try to do, instead of blocking out all the lights on a certain part of the body, is creating a small accent light that only lights the part of the face you want to be brighter and use a gobo filter to give the influence the correct shape. And then just turn down the exposure of all the other lights far enough that the brightness on the lit part of the face returns to where you have it now.

[mspeer]

Hi!

"...one to every light including the skylight..."

- Yes.

[Bruce_Pynchon]

I'll give this a shot, thank you!