Hey guys,
I am lately working on some ArchViz stuff and stumbled upon something that could be a huge problem for more professional architecturel guys as well as people who want to go a bit more crazy with lots of lights.
I started with experimenting how I can nicely do Lights that dont need a lot of individual emissive tweaking for the corresponding meshes. What I came up with uses basically a subsurface material on the light bulb or on some panels (or other shapes…think of bubble lights etc) but still has one sided geo. So when I put a stationary light inside, the shape gets illuminated and the light nicely casts through it and lights the surrounding scene.
The problem now is, I really need the sss material illuminated and soft baked shadows, however, if you have more complex shapes that need lights like this closer together and more in number, you will definitely run into the stationary light overlap limitation.
Switching to movable gets rid of the issue, but doesnt provide soft shadows that blend well with the high quality environment and costs too much performance (imagine 20 lights like this in a room).
Switching to static would help, but since the static light has no dynamic component, it doesnt trigger any reaction on the sss material.
So, I know that stationary lights switch to a dynamic override as soon as the overlap limit has been exceeded…but the question is, wouldnt it be possible to have a special flag to enable that the light instead casts static shadows while maintaining the ability to react with the sss material?
Or might there be a totally different way of doing this in general?^^
Here are some example screens of the issue (and these are only two…if you look at some nice vray interiors there would be way more)
Wall Unit with the Lights using fully static lights:
As you can see…this arrangement needs 5 lights. The wall unit itself can not really be split up more and you also have the wall behind it.
Here you can see how the sss part doesnt react to the static light:
This is a version with a dynamic light. Stationary looks the same but with soft shadows. Here the sss material reacts to the light:
It would be really cool to have an option for static lights to affect sss. Here are some other examples for a nice use for this:
Would be cool if you have some ideas on this The proposed feature was just what came to my mind first, but its probably way more complicated
Cheers!