[Radiance-general] organizing scenes with many light sources

[Lars Grobe]

Hi Greg!

> If you lights are clustered together, you might be able to put them  
> in an enclosing sphere and use mkillum to determine their collective  
> output distribution, using only as many spherical illum's to light  
> your space.  (Spheres are in general faster to use as lights because  
> there is only one sphere per source.)

Good point, so I save 3 faces per cluser.

> What is the exact configuration of your oil lamps?  Are they all the  
> same?  Do you have any close-ups you can post somewhere?

At the moment, one lamp is represented just as one sphere with modifier
light, and all are the same. Maybe I will add some basic geometry later
(using instances), but as the lamps are so small compared to the room, that
is not urgent.

I do the following at the moment:

1) I have a file conataining one lamp (that is only one modifier and one
sphere description at the moment.

2) I build my clusters by !xform statements in one file per cluster. E.g. I
have conical arrangement (a bit like christmas trees), so the corresponding
file has some !xform-arrays to create circular groups of lights in differemt
heigths and radius. I would put the mkillum-sphere in here, too.

3) The clusters are placed by markers and the replmarks tools.

As I wrote this, I found how stupid it is to have the light modifier
definition IN the lamp file (1), as this means that I have some thousand
definitions of my lamp modifier now (after xforming them to arrays)... all
the same. The first I will change tonight!

I think a close-up of a lght sphere is not interesting? ;-) But there have
been nice flames for oil lamps modeled before with radiance. I will post an
url tonight to a paper describing it.

CU Lars.