Light Fog problems in Maya...

Thrillho

Hey guys... I'm having some lighting difficulties in Maya... I want to add light fog to two headlights on a vehicle, but when I render, there is a strange multiplying effect where the two light cones overlap. Anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this?

Warheart

A picture of the problem would be helpful to work out what's going wrong Not sure what you mean by "multiply" at the moment. Does it get too dark or too bright?

Thrillho

Warheart wrote: »

A picture of the problem would be helpful to work out what's going wrong

Oh, right, duh. :poly142:

http://img823.imageshack.us/i/lightfogissues1.jpg/

The existing lights are supposed to be pretty subtle, but when they cross each other's paths, they suddenly become overly bright.

Warheart

hmm that's weird. It doesn't do that by default. I just tried setting up two spot lights with light fog with their cones intersecting and it rendered in a pretty sensible way.

Are these being rendered on layers? Is there anything unusual about the way you have them connected to the shading engine?

edit: oh, also just to check you're rendering with MR?

Thrillho

I was rendering with Maya Software, but I tried switching to Mental Ray, and it produced basically the same results.

I've tried to google up an answer to this, without much success, but someone had brought up the idea of using a volumetric fog and just shining 2 lights into it, rather than having a light fog attached to each light. I'm going to play around with that idea today, and hope it solves the problem.

Oh, and I'm using Maya 2008, if that makes any difference.

Warheart

hmm yea volumetric fog is worth a try but I suspect it's going to be difficult to achieve the subtle effect you're looking for with it.

I was testing on maya 2011 so it may be something they fixed recently. Does it happen if you just create two lights with default settings in a new scene?

Thrillho

Hmmm... I think I figured out what is causing the problem... It only seems to have that strange error when I duplicate the light (which is what I did in the original scene). If I make a new light from scratch, the problem does not seem to occur.

Thanks for all your suggestions, I should be able to figure it out from here!