Soften Your Spotlights; Quick and Easy Fix

Introduction

If Alpha Maps control what you see, Lighting (done correctly) controls where you look and why.  It’s an area I’ve neglected a little bit with this blog so far, but it also happens to be my favourite part of creating a scene.  In my opinion it’s the main story-telling tool in your arsenal – you can highlight the important parts of a scene, shroud other parts, set the mood, tell the story and even change the entire feeling of the piece just by tweaking the lighting.

Today we’re going to look at Spotlight Parameters, and how you can soften the edges and make the light seem more natural.  Using the default parameters for spotlights (targeted and otherwise) will give you a very crisp, unnatural line.  There’s one parameter that will change that and make a huge difference to your scene, and that’s what we’re going to play with today.

Scene

We’re starting with a very simple scene; a sphere, a plane, and a simple target spotlight.  The spotlight has shadows enabled just to make the technique easier to see, and all the objects are textured with the same default grey material.

Changes and Alterations

To get the effect we want (ie. A softer edge on the light) go into the modify tab on the spotlight and scroll down until you see ‘Spotlight Parameters’.  Expanding that menu will show you this:

You can see that the hot spot and falloff are very close to each other by default, which is what gives the light it’s crisp edge.  All we need to do to soften it is make the Falloff field value larger.

Alternatively, you can make the hot spot smaller; so long as the distance between the two parameters grows the edge will soften.

Explanation

The reason this works is because the Hotspot defines how large the brightest part of the spotlight is (much like the name would suggest), whereas the Falloff defines where the light stops shining.  If they’re close together you don’t get much time for the light to decay between the two values.  When you increase this, there’s more time for the light to ‘fade’ and it gives you a softer edge as a result.

Wrapping Up

As I mentioned in the introduction, this was just a quick pointer to help you use spotlights more effectively.  I’ll be talking about lighting more in the coming weeks, as well as my more usual texturing tricks; if there’s anything you particularly want me to talk about then please let me know!

Thanks for reading and I hope this was useful for you; let me know in the comments below.  See you Friday!

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