Hey folks,
What is the best way to light a room if the primary light source is a lamp with a lampshade on it? I hope others of you have tried and like me said, 'that looks like shizz.'

Is it possible to mimic light coming from a lamp or do you always have to fake it?

Give the lampshade shade some translucency. It will slow down renders, but it adds the effect. You also might want to check out using a light gel.

I think the main effect of a lampshade is to diffuse the light source, changing it from a small point-source (sharp shadows) to a rather large one (soft shadows).

Judiciously placed, wide klieg lights around the outside of the shade might get you some of that.

I made a lamp! The lamp is completely white. The only thing different is the lamp shade and that has 75% translucency. You have to make the lamp shade solid though. One shot is with radiosity, one is with raytracing, and one is in wireframe mode.

I've attached a quick render of the lamp on a table in a room. For some reason, final gathering isn't working very well in v12.0p. I've also attached the results I'm getting with final gathering on.

You are bumping into the same problem as when using HDRI maps for lighting. In this scene, the lamp base right under the bulb (the part that is very bright in the render) is way way brighter than the rest of the scene. This will produce noise (those bright spots on the walls) during final gathering. This is to be expected. One way to take care of that is to turn "Radiance" on the lamp base to a very low value, maybe even zero.

Now I've got something else to play with. Thanks! I'll post results later.

I made a rendering over night of the lamp and the lighting noise was cleaned up a bit, but not all the way. I've also attached the same frame with raytracing. I only changed the transparency and the translucency of the lamp shade. It's 25% transparent, and 50% translucent. The radiosity render took 3.6 hours, and the ray trace took 22 minutes. Even for the ten times longer renders, I'd take radiosity over ray tracing.

Looks good so far.



Would adding more final gathering samples get rid of the noise? or is that just a matter of photons and jittering?




I've been trying to do this for a while, i found it works well, if u cheat a bit.


Make the lamp shad 80 percent tranlucent 20 percent transparent, then use a 30 percent light, but increase radiosity intesity alot, until it looks good


Ben