Linear Light Source II

OK, I’m a liar: I said I was DUH-UH-UHN with nightime renderings of this space. Then Cadsoft added their LED Light Strip, which actually casts light! So, against better judgment, I tried again.

The wall sparklies are back with a vengeance! Primary culprit is the ceiling fan…with all of 2% reflection. Other culprits remain unidentified at this writing.

I tried hiding the light/dark/light phenomenon inherent in the new downloadable Cadsoft LED fixture by elevating the LED Light Strips inside of the non-light-casting squished fluorescent fixtures already placed. Errr…marginally successful.

Couple things are on me: The Cadsoft LED Light Strip I added on the ceiling beam on the far side of the see-thru fireplace’s chimney, facing the camera, was a few inches too long. And the nearest LED Light Strip was a couple feet too low due to a major miscalculation on my part. (See previous whining about ceiling fixtures not automagically snapping to ceilings like I’d expect them to, instead of an arbitrary distance above finish floor.)

The horrific tape-and-float job between 100% coplanar sheetrock surfaces at the opening on the left side? All on the virtual sheetrock contractor: Cadsoft.

AAAAAND, it took about 6.5 hours to render this, instead of about an hour before the LED fixtures were added. (See previous whinings about render times in Env 15, inability to offload to otherwise idle PCs, and/or to Cadsoft cloud for a reasonable price.)

So I’m no longer DUH-UH-UHN with this render. Now, I’m DUH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UHN. (3 more UH’s.)

A true linear light source that renders as ONE light source for each of 18 fixtures instead of (in this case) 86 point light sources across the 2 rooms, would go a long way to fixing rendering time. And at least as importantly, lighting accuracy!

To be fair, I don’t know if other high- or low-end rendering software has solved linear light sources. But it certainly needs solving.

Fixing 2% reflectivity that casts acne all over nearby wall surfaces is a Cadsoft problem.

Offloading rendering to local or cloud computers would help a lot, too, of course, if only that was an option!

The good news: I’m satisfied that this will be pretty cool lighting in real life, even if I can’t render it to save my life in Env 15.

Now, on to fixing the tasteless babysh!t yellow fireplace brick. Can’t blame that on Cadsoft. On the contrary, Cadsoft did a pretty good job rendering it in all its awfulness. No, that’s some 1980’s architect’s fault. It’s my job to fix that.

Conrad, thanks, but, um, I lied again. I’m so ashamed.

Every time I think I’m duh-uh-uh-uh-uhn…I try one more thing.

And this time I discovered root cause! It’s the friggin’ fluorescents.

On a hunch, I selected all my original squished fluorescents and chose “Lights Off” from the context menu. But left them there to look all uniformly lit up and stuff like that which the official “LED Strip Light” does not manage to do. Fixed the boo-boos I mentioned in my last post, then rendered again.

LivingRoom06.png is the surprisingly appealing result (brick notwithstanding). It has that sort-of 1980s-Star-Trek:-The-Next-Generation look I’m after. (And, aren’t we all?) (Make it so, Number One.) (But my friends call me Number Two.)

The bright/dim/bright/dim/bright effect is still there. Not OK, but much more OK than what I started with.

Off-topic aside: I read somewhere that some of the pipes and ducts in the ST:TNG sets were labeled “GNDN”. Apparently, that stood for “Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing.”

Something about those evillllll fluorescent fixtures (a) casts ZERO light, except (b) in tiny little dots that look like a 1970s disco ball and (c) reflect wildly on any 2% reflective surface. Now, disco is a mere few years prior to ST:TNG, and while well within bounds of my misspent youth, completely unacceptable. ST:TNG was awesome. Disco sucked.

Buoyed by my newfound discovery, I set out to prove the fluorescents were responsible. And did.

TrivialPreview.png shows a trivial model illuminated solely by “Fluorescent Ceiling Office Fixture”. This is the fixture I squished to make my first attempt at LED strip lighting. These are unsquished so as to rule out coefficient of squishiness as a contributing factor.

And TrivialRender.jpg is how it rendered. Rather high contrast, wouldn’t you say? Surfaces are either sparkly for reasons known only to the rendering engine, or Vanta Black(r), or Luminous.

I don’t know if rendering time improved without the light-sucking-disco-ball fluorescents because I left it running overnight, and I was so excited by the output I forgot to check. Suspect it was better, but don’t know.

Cadsoft, pleeeeeease fix those seriously broken fluorescent lights in the Catalog! I’ve burned a TON of time on this.

Now, about that brick…

Thank you, Conrad.

Thanks, Conrad! And this was just the sequel of the “Linear Light Source” topic, which I did not know at the time I’d not be able to continue to post to due to forum authentication problems also reported by others. And hopefully now resolved, as mine appears to be.

Now to make this thread even longer…

It’s become really obvious as I’ve worked with “11w LED Strip Light 24 inch” that we need to be able to do all the things with LED light strips that we do with other objects. Stretch them, curve them, add nodes, convert them to surfaces…basically, emulate digitally what we could do with a roll of analog LED tape.

In my case, I have created a rectangular Floor Surface, elevated it and used it as a fireplace mantel in my model. Then rotated it something degrees off the orthogonal chimney (see attachment). Then stretched, rotated, shrunk, stretched again, rotated again…until I got it…ermmm…maybe about right. Need to see the render.

And upon whose upper face I want to add recessed strip LEDs behind a frosted lens to wash the chimney and tchotchkes placed on the mantle.

But I doubt I’ll ever get “11w LED Strip Light 24 inch” to follow my Dee-Zine. I can do it eventually by customizing the strip light to fit the rectangle, rotated back to orthogonal temporarily for convenience in placement. When finished, rotate it back where I want it.

I know that.

But what if…just what if…I could DRAW the light strip into my model and have it do what the FIXTURE needs to do to work with MY model? And have it adjust as I adjust the size and rotation of the mantel object?

If they were true “Linear Light Sources” like I’ve been requesting, they would.

But since they’re multiple, equally-spaced, point light sources within a narrow rectangular outline, and 24″ long, like Cadsoft’s LED strip light imitations-within-the-limitations of Env 15, and mostly unaware of their virtual surrounding objects, I will need to calculate point light locations and add additional point light sources as needed for light strips on each of the irregular sides. And the non-orthogonal mantle wraps around 3 sides of the chimney. So this will be non-trivial. And will likely have to be revised a few times after I see the render and view from more viewpoints.

(All of which probably taking almost as long as it took to write this post! But it’s worth the investment; at least if Cadsoft is listening.)

I still have a road ahead to get this mantle design done the way I Envisioned it. And Gad-forbid if I want to make any adjustments after I see the render!

Flashback: In the late 1990s, when I was IT Director of a major Houston TX architecture firm I worked for at the time, pushing them to adopt then-nascent 3D CAD, the designers’ number one objection was that they didn’t want software to dictate what they could envision (small ‘e’).

Flashforward (and poetic justice): 30-ish years later, that’s exactly the conundrum that ex-architect-now-IT-consultant me is faced with…while using a 2020 design tool named Envisioneer (capital ‘E’)!

Sure would be easier for me to forget all this Dee-Zine stuff, rotate that mantle back to orthogonal, and calculate its outside dimensions on a 2′ module for the light strip I want to recess an inch or so back from its edge.

“11w LED Strip Light 24 inch” is better than nothing, which is what Env 15 ships with. But it’s still–forgive me–a lame hack. Fine for cove lights or under-cabinet lights, maybe. But not an LED tape in any way.

Ironic that in my misspent, pencil-on-vellum, architect youth, if I designed something that was impossible to build, my go-to, tension-diffusing, self-effacing jobsite joke when talking to the superintendent was, “Well, I don’t know why it’s so hard for you to BUILD; it was real easy for me to DRAW.” Then everyone belly-laughs, while the architect escapes getting punched out.

Cadsoft: With Envisioneer, it’s too often the opposite: Easy to build, hard to draw. Please provide a usable, Dee-Zine-friendly, LED tape. As easy-breezy as graphite-on-yellow trash paper, constrained only by the geometry of the object in which it’s placed, and the imagination of the architect.