LIGHTS IN KERKYTHEA

Luca Picciau
tridem.altervista.org

Quick guide for managing the lights in Kerkythea Echo 2008

updated october 2010

In order to fully understand the several matters of this tutorial is recommended having read first
the ‘Getting Started’ guide, available at Kerkythea forum

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Kerkythea provides us four different kinds of light, and the possibility to make materials
emitting light, but this last one deserves another discussion apart as it's strongly related to
the material editor.

To insert the lights, if not yet imported from the 3D model and present in the scene, you
can select one type from the insert menu.
The available types are: Omni, Spot, IES, Projection

Omni is the omni-directional light, it spreads its rays from the center to all direction, like
the sun or a simple bulb light.

Spot is a directional light, like a spotlight indeed, with a wider or tighter angle of
illumination.

IES is a kind of light which has properties (intensity related to the incident angle)
described in a file with .ies extension. The result is very realistic!
KT provides one file as an example, but you can find a lot of IES in the web, many
constructors share the files of their spotlights. You can also find free apps that show a
preview of the shape.

Projector as says itself, is an image projector.

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The placement of lights is the same as for the other objects or cameras: when you insert it,
the light takes position and direction of the current point of view.
You can move or rotate it later using the Gizmo, but since KT has not parametric modifiers
to do this commands exactly, it's recommended insert them correctly using the standard
views in order to place the light parallel to the axes. Obviously you can place them before
export, in your modeling application.

The direction of the light is shown by a little bulge in the back of the lamp figure. Naturally
it doesn't matter for a omni light, but it's very important for the other types. Spot and
Projector, when selected, show a double Gizmo (like cameras) that simplify the targeting
on a point of the scene. By setting the Gizmo in translation mode, you can lock the
direction and move the whole light.
Unfortunately IES has not the double Gizmo when selected, so you must fix the direction
looking at the shape of the lamp, or as said before by inserting it with an appropriate point
of view.

In the figure below, an example of the double Gizmo and the meaning of the angle
parameters for spotlights (next chapter).

When you select a light (Omni and IES) a yellow sphere appears, which
represents the dimension of the emitter. This depends from the radius
value, expressed in meters, we'll see it later with the other properties.
It's extremely important you remember that this sphere cannot intersect
or contain any other object of the scene or you'll get weird artifacts in
your render. The same goes for spot and projector even if the sphere is
not shown when they're selected.

Position and radius of the light can be managed also with the controller
you can find in the upper-right corner of the window. The slider takes
different functions depending of which type of light is selected: radius
for the omni; hotspot/falloff for the spot; width/height for the projector.
This controller is useful typically to place the sun, which is quite far
from the scene, so that you can set his height on the horizon and
direction from the center of the axes.

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Enter the Settings > Scene… menu, or right-click on the name of the light and select Edit
Light… to open the light's properties window. You can switch to the other lights in the
scene without exiting the window, by using the list in the bottom-left corner.
If you have a lot of lights with the same values you can group them, so that you can modify
the parameters only in the group and they'll be transferred to the single lights.

The panels Flags and Measures are the same for all kind of lights.

Enable – simply turns on/off the light; usually you do it by right-click the name in the
scene tree.

Shadow – Enables the shadow casting, obviously it's always enabled, except in rare cases.

Soft Shadow – If actived, the shadows look softened depending on the dimension (radius)
and distance of the light, as it is in real world. To achieve a photorealistic render we can
say you must use it. On the other hand rendering time and computation difficulty will
grow.

Negative Light – If actived, inverts the behavior of your object, which will absorb light
instead of emitting it (strongly unrecommended)

Global Photons – If enabled, includes this component in the render computation when
using biased engines. The result is more realistic (recommended).

Caustic Photons – If enabled, includes the computation of caustics, with consequent

increment of complexity and rendering time.

Shadow Color – Normally black. Might have sense changing it when using lower presets
which don't calculate indirect lighting, in order to avoid too dark areas (unrecommended).

Radius – Expressed in meters, is referred to the light sphere as described before.

If soft shadows are enabled, higher is the radius more softened will be the shadow edges.

Multiplier – This value defines the intensity of the light. It's not directly related to physical
units (like watts or lux). Just to give a reference value, let's say we'll use mainly values
between 1 and 10

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The other parameters for OMNI lights:

Color – No explanations is needed. In the real world, almost

never lights are 100% white (as any object colors) ; to have
thorough results you can try doing little tone variations, and
of course you can use this controller for colored lights.

Attenuation – Sets the attenuation of your light depending

on the distance from the source.
The possible values are:
None= no attenuation (typically used for the sun) ;
Inverse= the light decreases proportionally with the
distance;
Inverse Square= the light decreases proportionally with the
squared distance (typically used for little lamps that light
only the closest objects).
This parameter is one of the reasons for which is very
important working in a correct scale 1:1

...for IES lights:

Apart the Color said before, there's only a field to choose the
.ies file – in this case the attenuation parameter has no
sense, as it's defined in function of a polar graph by the file
itself.

...for SPOT lights:

We have Color and Attenuation as for the omni ones, then

there are the angle values both for the strongest light cone
(Hot Spot) and the soft one (Fall Off), as shown before in
the picture.

...for PROJECTOR lights:

We have Color and Attenuation as for the previous ones,

furthermore there is the field to upload the image you want
to project, and the values of Width and Height that define
the dimension of the projected image.

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At the end of this short guide, I'd like to remind you that lighting is a very important part of
the rendering work, but sometimes neglected.

For sun-lighted scenes your workflow can be pretty easy: a sun with the correct radius,
soft-shadows enabled, and perhaps a nice spherical sky will give you great results.

Interiors and nighttime scenes need a bit more practice, because of many lights to manage
that interact in a unpredictable manner. When possible, is better using IES lights, that are
much more realistic than a simple spotlight.

Also, consider that the number of lights in your scene affects strongly the rendering time.
So, don't use them if you don't need and disable all the ones that are out of the scene.

I've done this guide for free, to help new users in learning some KT features, I
anticipatively do apologize for any mistake or lacks.

Happy Rendering!

Luca Picciau
tridem.altervista.org

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