Playing around with my little underwater scene, i was just getting the hang of volumetric, visible lights. Got my little submarine, search lights burning through the water, just a little tweaking and I'm set, right? Wrong. I have the scene on the left set up with the searchlights and an overhead for illumination and caustics. Now I want to add a bit of glow to the interior of the sub. I drop in a small, radial light set to a range that is just inside the glass dome and voila... the picture on the right. Why did the spotlights pick up the color of the radial light?

Here is the wireframe of the sub. The position of the the radial light (even if it weren't ranged) should insure that the two lights would not merge. This is driving me nuts...

Couldn't you just up the ambience on the dome to simulate the interior being lit? Just ignore this if it doesn't make sense, I'm having trouble doing silvery fish that don't reflect their surroundings...:

What's the range setting on your radial light?

Nuke, try setting your radial range lower, first try 5, then 3 and see if that does anything. You may even have to go less. It seems you're working in very small units. You may have to fine adjust your range (2.56 or something like that).

Zhann: The dome on the front of the sub has an ambience of 100 along with the diffuse (this was done after the initial discovery of the red light incident; it turned rather opaque, despite that it is over 50% transparent. Clay: The radial light is set at ranged falloff of 10, the upper level of the glass dome meassure 11.1 from the center of the radial light. Quest: I haven't yet tried shortening (?) the range on the radial light -- ran out of time after posting this nightmare. But why, oh why, are the spots picking up the entire color. I could understand that if there were some overlap of the lights, the color might change (additive, and all that) but these are basically three different lights pointing three different ways where nary the twain should meet! I say again, Arrrgh! BTW: my final challenge may be late or may be the wip already posted. Now, where's my damn whiskey?

Nuke, you need only drop render in the suspected areas when you make the changes, shouldn't take all that long to see if shortening the falloff range works. Give it shot and see. You sure you don't have other lights in the area that you haven't taken into account?

I had the same kind of problem last week with volumeric lights. It was in my tower image where you have a parallel tube light pointing upwards. Then I put a normal spotlight pointing to the doorway at the base of the tower. What happened was that the volumeric light at the top took on the color of the spotlight at the bottom. I vaguely remember something about objects and textures, when being higher with the same texture it affects the lower texture. Not a very good description but does anyone have an idea on this being the problem, ie. similar objects taking on the qualities of the lower object? Catlin

Nukeboy, On your volumetric spotlight select it press M (not E) go into material options and uncheck light sensitive. See if that helps. - TJ

Well, I think Catlin has it pegged, it must be a bug. I reduced the ranged falloff to 1 and it still colored the spots. Eliminating "light sensitive" caused all sorts of ugly problems. I guess I'll have to render the scene in a couple of passes... Another thing I've found a problem with, additive light. Without checking additive, the volumetric light just doesn't work, but when checked, at first glance, it looks right. unfortunately, it is not so. When looking through the visible beam of the spotlight, the background that is perpendicular to the stream of light is illuminated, which, of course, cannot happen... light has a certain amount of coherency. Gah! I think I'll go back to simple room interiors, maybe NVIATHAS (naked vikki in a temple holding a sword)!

Nukeboy, don't give up quite yet! It's really not so difficult of a workaround. Render the scene like you did the first way, then save that image, then plop-render it the second way. Save that image. Render an "Object Mask" render, and composite the sections in Photoshop. Piece of cake.

Yup, tha's pretty much what I've resigned myself to do. It would just be nice if the dang thing worked the way it should...

(nods distinctly) Aye, Nukeboy, I had a similar problem in my latest WIP. It involved the TIR levels, as most of the scene didn't require the Ray Depth and TIR past 6... So I am rendering the scene at 6 (for both settings) and then I'll plop render the "infinite" reflections at maybe 16 or 24.... Time-saver, for sure! A hybrid rendering engine would either do that for us or let us program it a bit better, but still, there's things the Bryce 5 can do that I'm still blown away by!

nukeboy, OK I stil think you can do it by turning off light sensitivity, which BTW I think answered your original question, but you'll need to turn off the sun too, and play around with base density to acomplish the effect you're looking for & darken your shadows and cloud colors and perhaps live without fog and haze. Also the radial light's range if too large will ruin any edge sofness of the spotlight, but I think you could do it with enough playing around with this stuff. If you don't want to turn off the sun, haze, fog etc (which would create other problems in your scene which would have to be corrected for), it looks like you might be stuck with the plop render idea. - TJ

Confirmed that it's a bug with the radial light. I created a hollow sphere with no openning to the "outside world" and stuck a radial light set a intensity 1, ranged falloff 1. It not only colored the spotlights, but cast a faint light on to the bottom of the scene... Ah well, maybe in Bryce 6.

Confirmed that it's a bug with the radial light. I created a hollow sphere with no openning to the "outside world" and stuck a radial light set a intensity 1, ranged falloff 1. It not only colored the spotlights, but cast a faint light on to the bottom of the scene... Ah well, maybe in Bryce 6.