Indigo Renderer Forum

I am trying to render a kitchen using the indigo and blender, and it was going great until I added another light. At first I had a single flattened sphere as the light in the center of the ceiling, but when I added three more lights, (meshes shaped like bulbs,) only one of the lights would actually cast a glow on anything. The other 3 glowed, but didn't cast light on anything. What's wrong?
EDIT: Here's some pictures on blenderartists of the problem. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=193355

Could you post your .blend file? (you may have to compress it to a .zip for the website to take it)

Here's the blend file.

This is a really weird issue. I tried merging all of your lightbulbs into one object, because i thought if only the first one emitted light then if i merged them all there would only be "one". Didnt work.

I tried making separate materials for lights, didn't work. I tried changing the light layer...still didnt work.

One thing I thought was really weird is that when I took the model of the bulb that was emitting light and duplicated it, only its duplicate started emitting light and not the original (which was before I duplicated it).

Try this:
a) Delete all the non working lights
b) Duplicate (shift-d im saying so you dont use alt-d which is similar) the working light and copy it to where the non working ones were.

Seemed to work for me.

I tried what you suggested, but it remained the same. That one light still works, but the others don't. I also tried deleting the light that works thinking that maybe it was messing with the other ones, but they still didn't work.

tlehmann1996 wrote:I tried what you suggested, but it remained the same. That one light still works, but the others don't. I also tried deleting the light that works thinking that maybe it was messing with the other ones, but they still didn't work.

Also one thing i did was cut the top half of the bulb. because the faces facing upwards dont light the scene directly.

I tried cutting the tops off and duplicating it then, but still there is no difference.

Your situation was really bugging me so I re-extracted your scene from the .rar and downloaded the materials you used from the database (instead of just making them gray diffuse) and then I let it bake all night.

When I looked at it this morning I noticed something quite interesting, your lights do work or at least they do in the file I have. I highlighted the "area of influence" of the lights in front of the room. As you'll notice on the left edge of the image the counter has a brighter area which cannot be attributed to the light closest to the wall in the center of the image.

In the same way the highlights on the corner of the counter near the right cannot be from the center light and finally if the two lights in the back (which I circled green on the top view) werent working, the area behind the counter (where the chairs are) should be a lot darker.

I added some ceiling lights and am rendering it again, but I was wondering something. This has nothing to do with the lighting issue, but I removed the two walls that aren't in view because I read somewhere that you should have open space so the photons don't bounce around an infinite number of times, increasing render times. Is that true?

tlehmann1996 wrote:I added some ceiling lights and am rendering it again, but I was wondering something. This has nothing to do with the lighting issue, but I removed the two walls that aren't in view because I read somewhere that you should have open space so the photons don't bounce around an infinite number of times, increasing render times. Is that true?

I think so, partly. See from what I understand the "photons" will bounce around x number of times, and if you work inside a completely enclosed space like your scene they won't have a choice but to reach that amount of bounce. However, there seems to be a system in place in indigo to determine when a photo is going to "never come back" by boxing in your scene with another box and so if the photon hits that box then it's "gone" and wont have to reach x amount of bounce.

tl;dr;
a) Yes that might speed things up
b) It may affect the end result.
c) Try replacing the walls we cant see by exit portals (create new mesh, assign another material and call it whatever you want and set it's type to "Exit Portal"

Delete all Yellow Light material assignments, save scene and reopen, recreate material.

It's telling me that I need to have it set to background color, environment map, or physical sky and sun, but not None (lit by mesh emitters.) Does this mean that I can't use the light bulbs anymore, or will they still work?

@daq: I ran into the same problem as OP when working on one of my own scenes (oddly it's the first time I run into this) and I tried to do what you said. I nuked the material, closed blender, opened it again, re-created the material but it still did the same thing.

Also, I have to mention I have three lamps and the lamps themselves are three different meshes sharing the same material while the "bulbs" are one mesh. For testing purposes I tried changing the material definition for the lamps to make them transparent to see inside them and only one of the three got the "new" material while the other two stayed the same (and of course the last "bulb" still wasnt working)

Exporter issue?

Hmmm... duplicate .igmesh files? Try deleting the 0001 folder (or whatever frame you're at) so it forces Blendigo to export everything... That's all I can suggest. I've never run into that problem (knock on wood...).