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What is the best way to simulate a lightbulb that lights up a room, i dont want to have to use a sphere with an emitter material as it contains way too many triangles, what do you think?

i dont want to have to use a sphere with an emitter

Have you tried a cube hanging from a vertex?

I thougnt of a cube but surely that will look like light is directed out of four sides only and give four distinct shadows as opposed to a sphere which would give an overall light

i dont know thopugh as i havent tried it yet:)

Ric_535 wrote:I thougnt of a cube but surely that will look like light is directed out of four sides only and give four distinct shadows as opposed to a sphere which would give an overall light

i dont know thopugh as i havent tried it yet:)

Me neither, really, I am just assuming that the faces one uses for lighting are further sampled. You could actually start with a pyramid and move on to a cube and to more refined polyhedrons until you get what you want.
It would be nice if there were a bit more explanation form NL on how to set up artificial lighting. I haven't seen any.

Adam Trachtenberg wrote:Hi Ric,
I would use a Cinema sphere primitive and set the subdivisions to the minimum number. That will give you the rough shape with relatively few polygons.

yeah thats basically what i decided, the thing is though, when you think of a real lightbulb its only the filament giving off the light which is surounded by the bulb, so maybe there is a way to simulate this instead

In cases like this i think it would be pretty good if you could use a single point or dummy object to act as a emitter as the light would radiate out from that single point in a spherical shape just like the light from a common lightbulb does. And it requires pretty much no geometry at all either so it should render faster

/ Max

yeah and u have sharp shadows like in the days before arealights......doh

When creating lightbulbs i found that using a simple emitter ( 4 faced object ) inside a modelled lightbulb works well. Lightbulbs in real life glow, therefore i added a sss diffuse to my bulb geometry and this seem to create the effect i was after with still using the least possible polys for an emitter with a nice smooth model of a bulb.

make that 5 faced emitter, doh !

haha, you cheeky monkeys are everywhere