AREA LIGHTING FOR VUE

  A nice ability in Vue (for some versions), is to convert an object to an actual light source. You can do it on any Vue solid object, even a terrain, or an imported mesh.
The object will emit light, now, what's special is that in real life, light doesn't come from infinitely small points (apart from a black hole, lol). Our eyes notice this, real lights come from the radiating surfaces of objects, some quite large, such as burning buildings, or small like a candle flame. It has a serious impact on how shadows and lighting are formed.

  Area lights are nice because they throw a soft, dispersed light, with shadows showing the light source is more than a mere point in space, which never happens in real life.
Note the two pics below, the first shows a area light made from a cylinder, beside a point light, the second shows a figure illuminated by a large sphere (just off camera) turned into an area light.

  One of the tricks I've found with this technique, is to make a "magical" liquid or weapon glow (such as a magic potion). I duplicate the original liquid object, in the bottle, convert that to an area light and then make it so the lighted version doesn't show on the render, only it's light...gives a nice look ;) Sometimes you may need to re-size the area light object larger or smaller, and maybe add a glow to the original object's material, to get best "magical looking" results (see below).

You can hide form the render a duplicated object made into an area light, so only the original normal object will show, thus you get the best of both worlds: an original that's lit and maybe glowing because of the hidden area light object.
This is often necessary because an area light object loses material detail due to the brightness of it.
To hide an area light, at the moment, 12-03-2009, it depends on which version of Vue you have:

• For Vue 6, just select "Hide object from Render" on the object panel, to hide the area light.
• For Vue 7, make a new layer, make that layer hidden, then render and set the render options to render "Only visible layers", thus the hidden layer, with the area light, won't show, only it's light will.
  Rutra on Renderosity discovered this work around! :)
• For Vue7, another way is to hit F6, to bring up scene material summary. Select the area light material. Select "only shadows", now the object is hidden but still shines light!
  This tip is from John Canver at E-On :)
  

  Note that sometimes (with Vue6 but not Vue7), a lens flare is applied as default when you convert an item into an area light, this is generally not what you want with such lights! Check for that.
Also, since they are, by their very nature, a "soft" light, area lights' shadows tend to be very noisy, requiring more rendering time to get rid of the "grain", or post work to blur it (more on this below)

  Vue 6 and 7 also has "Light Panels" in the choices of lights you can pick. "Light Panels" are flat planes that act as lights, basically an alpha plane converted to an area light. Very nice for some scenes, but again...tend to be noisy, so, long render times ;)
The disadvantage light panels have, is they don't have a curved or varied surface shape, which is what lets area lights made from objects have such lovely detailing the eye subconsciously notices. However, they are perfect for lighting built into walls etc etc.

AREA LIGHT TIP!

In Vue 7 I discovered the area lights were too grainy, while using better render quality helps, it doesn't solve the problem very well. There is however an easy way to fix it, it does increase render times, but not as badly as using very high custom render settings.

Edit the area light object, now, edit the "SOFTNESS QUALITY", put the quality slider to 100%, and push the maximum traced shadows sliders from150 to 400, or more ( try adjusting in steps of 50, test rendering the scene with just flat white material applied to everything for quick render times, I find 400 is good quality).
The default is only 4/16 rays which is far too few, pushing it way up gives wonderful soft shadows with no grain!
I find minimum rays 8, maximum 400 is good. For best results, 100% quality is needed!

However, in scenes where there's a lot of broken, irregular features, say, plants around the area, you may not notice the grain so much, so lower settings maybe quite fine and thus, save you render time. Indoors in a fine modern home with lots of flat, simple, clean surfaces, you would notice it more. So it's a question of trial and error.

Now, I hide the sphere as explained above, so it won't show in the render, and add a grass ecosystem.
The grass hides the grainy shadows! you can of course use higher settings of shadow, which will improve the look, but it shows that having a flat ground object or clean, flat surrounding objects will show the graininess worse than rough terrains and plants.

Up to you to chose the level of quality vs render time for the scene.

Now, to show some practical application and comparisons of this :)

Here, I load in a camp fire. I add in a point light above the fire. Not a bad look, but it's actually not very realistic. Camp fires have complex light and shadow coming from a very large area, not an infinitesimal point.

Next, I alter the material of some parts of the camp fire, and give them "Illumination". since I'm rendering in a Radiosity setting, the illuminatiion literally lights up the scene! Interesting, but not strong enough.

Please take not of this trick for other renders: with illumination on, in materials, radiosity renders will actually get lit up by them!

Increasing the illumination of the material, by the way, just overwhelms the object material and it becomes washedo ut and unrealistic, so you can't use illuminated material itself ot light this scene, but it can work very nice for some things, or to add light from objects such as LEDs, floor lights etc.

Next, I delete the sphere, and make the fire logs into area lights! Very interesting lighting, eh? :)

But you don't get logs glowing like that in real life, hehe!