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I am having the hardest time with studio lighting right now. For some reason I can not get any direction (spot) on my lights. They just wash across everything. Instead of a nice gradient look. I have lit in the studio a bunch of times, but these lights just are not working how I would like. Does anyone have any pointers on this? I have seen the post of building the spot light. But there has to be a better solution then going through such an elaborate process. I love using maxwell for nice interior lighting, but that is more of a wash approach. But studio lighting I need to spot on some highlights and such. Like I said, I am just looking for some pointers.

Thanks

Cody

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMN3EsVShh4

With yours truly. Watch from min 8 to about 15, but there are some other infos relating to lighting in general which can be interesting to know about.

Awesome an hour and half on studio lighting. Wish I would have found this sooner. Thanks a lot Mihai

One question, I am sure I will have more but one of them, on that spotlight you created. You have that emitter shooting up into the cylinder then the light reflects back out correct?

Thanks

No, it still shoots down. If it shoots up, it's own geometry would block most of the light and make the render not so efficient. The idea here is that a regular emitter surface will emit light 180 degrees from its surface so you have to constrain this spread somehow. So this approach gets close to how a real spotlight would work and how you can focus the beam by moving the emitter surface up further into the spotlight cylinder.

Yeah with a little testing I got it working. Thanks for the tutorial and tips. They really helped.