area vs spot lights

bugo

Is it just me or the Area lights are 10x stronger than the spot lights? I'm trying to get a spot to show, but I'm having to force the intensity of it to 8 (which is max) to show anything. I wouldn't like to put distance falloff farther or it can cross boundaries.

Someone have any clue what can I do about these spot lights?

Brendan

Unity spot light attenuation is range-dependant, and vaguely quadratic. So if set to a mystical range property, it'll behave exactly like a point light in Maya set to quadratic.

You can write your own attenuation:
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/SL-Attenuation.html
But it'll NOT work with Deferred Rendering (default is hardcoded into DR like the blinn-phong model).

If you're after just one spot, then try some spotlights, they can be aimed and can use a cookie if you're up for some god-teir cheezing of GI on the floor (render AO on the floor (planar mapped) to a texture, assign texture to cookie in spot light, aim spotlight at floor from way up above, ???, incur wrath of many, many artists).

bugo

Right, right, as for the last thing, everybody does that, I guess... I do.

But wow, thanks for the documentation link, I'll check it out. It's weird that the default is quadratic, shouldn't it be linear? I'm glad it can be changed tho. THANKS!

Brendan

Well ideally it'd have an attenuation (light falloff) texture option like Cryengine3 (latest version) where you can control the falloff.

If you can post a pic of the area you're working on maybe I could offer a different way of doing it.

bugo

It's actually general, not a certain area.
But yeah, a falloff texture would be a great feature.
I am only looking for baking purposes, not dynamic/realtime.