Author Topic: Corona lights appear black when reflected on mirrors  (Read 2435 times)

2021-12-19, 17:57:04

Basshunter

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Why is this happening?
I'm using Corona 7

2021-12-22, 12:24:17
Reply #1

philipbonum

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If I'm not mistaken this is caused by your "Directionality".
This forces the light rays to go one way, and no rays go to the sides anymore. And because the only way we see anything in real life is if the light rays get reflected back to our eyes(Camera), and this is how Corona correctly handles these rays.

Then you might wonder "Why is the light visible in front of the mirror then?". This wasn't the case earlier and is a feature request from users and was fixed with "Prevent Black Appearance". This unfortunately doesn't fix mirror reflections of the lights.

So, either the devs need to make this checkbox also affect reflections,
OR
you could try an IES instead. These files usually send a bit light to the sides as well.
OR
you could use 2 lights, one for illumination with directionality at 0.6 and visibility turned off and one for reflections/refractions with directionality at 0.0 with visibility on.(Could work, but I haven't checked)

For whatever it's worth, I do wish they could make it work somehow. It's not always I can find the perfect IES for the situation.