Chaos Corona for 3ds Max > [Max] General Discussion

Scaling Lights

(1/2) > >>

Otuama:
Hi all.

A quick question about lights.

I never scale lights with the scale gizmo because I was told in the past that it can cause issues and artifacts.

I've just loaded a scene and someone has scaled rectangle lights & not used the width/height in the light settings.

Also other lights are scaled in the minus or look like they've been mirrored or something.

Am I right to think that it's bad practice to scale lights like that?

Thanks

TomG:
I've never had any trouble using the widget for scaling. I only use numeric input if I need precise sizes for some reason.

Otuama:
Hi, thanks for the reply.

Just to confirm, in your opinion it's ok to scale lights with the scale tool?

And the scaling being in the minus for example is ok too?

if that's the case then great

I was told wrongly years ago

hurrycat:
I guess it wouldn't be too difficult for someone (with better Maxscript skills than me) to write a small script that translates scale sizes to light dimensions..
Having all those custom scales wouldn't sit too well with me, from a scene organization standpoint. For example, one could have two lights that are instanced, so same Intensity and Length/Width, but produce different illumination because of custom ScaleX/Y values.

Having said that, I too would like to know if it would be totally ok to scale lights and not worry about artifacts or other issues. Wouldn't you run into issues if you created a light of 1cm by 1cm with an Intensity of 1, and then scale it by a large value to have it illuminate a large scene?

Otuama:
The only reason I realised this was the case in my scene was because I selected all instances of the lights and there are some that have been scaled with the widget/gizmo.

So yes, I'd like to be sure because now I know it's like it in the scene I'm in it's winding me up.  Too late to fix now but before I made this post I told the person who did it not to in future.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page