TABLE OF Contents
Houdini Native Lights
The plugin supports some of the Houdini native lights, extracting the most common parameters and building Redshift lights with them.
Redshift can extract the basic parameters of several Houdini lights:
- Point Light
- Spot Light
- Area Light
- Distant Light
- Environment Light
- Sky Light
Redshift Lights
The plugin adds to Houdini a set of custom light nodes to fully support the Redshift light types, parameters and lights shader features. The Redshift lights nodes can be added to the scene from the icons available in the Redshift shelf. The lights can be created using CTRL+Click over the icons to add them in the current viewport camera position.
The available lights are:
- RSLight (physical light)
- Light Dome
- IES Light
- Sun Light
- Light Portal
The Redshift light nodes are digital assets that you can edit if you need to add custom features, like for example textured lights. The light shader SHOP node can be found inside the light HDA node. The Sun light also includes an Sky environment shader, that is used by the plugin if this type of light is available in the scene. Both Sun and Sky shader settings can be configured inside the Sun light node.
Custom Light Shaders
By default each RSLight object has a light shader inside. The light shader path has been exposed to support custom light shaders, that can be shared among several lights. By default the Light Shader Path parameter is pointing to the internal OBJ light shader. Sharing a light shader makes possible adjust the shader parameters of a large amount of lights from only one place. Also this feature is useful if you want to work with custom shaders (for example to build lights with texture maps) without edit the OBJ internal node.
Lights Instancing
The plugin supports the instancing of the Redshift lights using the Instance OBJ node or the "instance" point attribute. It is possible instance multiple master lights inside the same OBJ using the "instance" attribute, that can point to any Redshift light available in the scene.
The point orientation attributes , for example “N”, can be used to align the directional lights. The plugin supports several user attributes at point level to configure the shader of each instance. The supported attributes are:light_color(float 3),light_temperature(float) andlight_intensity(float)
There is a new parameter in the OBJ spare parameters, instancing tab, to configure the lights shader instancing mode. The light instances can share the same light shader used by the master light, or each instance can have it’s own private shader. The user attributes are supported only in the second case.
