I have shadows turned off for my fill lights but they still create specular highlights and I can't figure out a way to stop it. Does anyone have any ideas short of doing a seperate specular pass and composting it with the main image? Thanks, Rich

Yes, Rich. You have to disable lens flare:-) for this special light source. :-)Guitta

I only know how to do this in the theatre, and I am not sure it would translate to Vue. Softening the light, by using a fresnel spot instead of a sharp spotlight would do it on stage unless the object was very shiny, in which case you have to use a diffusing gel as well. My instinct in Vue would be to soften the fill lights a bit, or even play around with making them volumetric as well. The trouble with softening lights is that it makes shadows go noisy, but if you have the shadows turned off that should not be a problem, unless it also substitutes noisy hightlights for sharp ones.

Just a thought, and it may turn out to be a useless one.

Have you tried dimming (darkening) the fill light? If you darken the light, at some point, the highlight may become sufficiently indistinguishable. You can always add more fill lights (add varying angles) to make up for the low lighting.

Turning off a light's specular highlight capability is a feature Vue 5 could use. Anybody else agree? - Charles

Guitta: Turning the lens flare off didn't affect speculars. I tried that already. Caroluk: I tried softening the fill lights and it didn't work. Trying to use a diffusing gel might be a good idea though. sittingblue: I tried dimming the fill lights but they were too dimm once the specular was gone. One thing I didn't try was using a less saturated color, something like a neutral grey. I think more light options would be a good thing for the wishlist. Stuff like turning off speculars and maybe an exclude list for each light so you can just light certain objects without adding to the overall light in the scene. I'll add it to the wishlist when I get a chance. Thanks for the help everyone. Rich

You also can use negative lights to take off parts of strong light. If you post a render of your problematic light... without seing what you want exactly, it's hard to answer to your question. Guitta

You still have to have light radiation within a scene, else there would be no point in having lights...so have you thought about using the Highlights option for the material of the object in question? From there you can have no highlights or change the highlight colour to black.

Cheers

Cheers: What I want is for my key light to create speculars but not the non-shadow casting fill lights. Guitta: I'll get some renders up tommorow to show what I mean. Rich

Hi,

Here is an example of what Rich is talking about. In VUE 4, all lights generate specularity (highlight). There is no way to turn it off. This can become a problem if you use many fill lights to create a "global" illumination.

On this example I used one spot light with shadows. This is the main/key light. I added four "shadowless" soft point lights to create an ambient lighting. As you can see it doesn't look right : the object has multiple highlights while only one light source is "noticeable".

Some other software have a "specularity" option. You are free to choose if you want the light to generate specularity or not. The 2 images at the bottom shows the same scene in another software. On the right the specularity is disactivated for all the fill lights. The only visible highlight is the one created by the main spot light. This gives a more natural look to the scene.

A "specularity" option for the lights should be on VUE 5 wishlist, don't you think ?

:) Eric

That is exactly the problem. Thanks for putting this up Eric. I've had too much going on and haven't had a chance. It should be on the wishlist, and I'd like to see exlcude lists as well. For now I'll have to do a seperate specular pass if its going to be a problem. Rich