How to keep light turned on?

[sutcac]

I never noticed that you can Dolly in and out through the doorway and the light does indeed remain on. Interesting. I suppose it depends on where the camera "originates". But as Gary says, you can have no light fixtures at all in a plan and see your way around just fine. There is always a generic and/or ambient light source so you can see what you are doing.

So, what you are seeing is not a problem in your plan or necessarily even a bug.

I am always curious why people make a lot out of light sources in render view modes. I find them almost completely irrelevant unless you are doing a raytrace.

[Dermot Dempsey]

This is normal behavior and the way the program was designed to work.

Lighting in Chief render views is done on a per-room basis. This was done many years ago because of limitations with the OpenGL rendering engine that we are using. We only turn on up to 8 lights (some video cards will support more) in the room that the camera is in. You can always tell what room your camera is in by looking at where it is located in your floor plan view.

While you are in a camera view and moving the camera from one room to another, we don't update the lighting right away. This was originally done to make sure moving around in camera views would be faster. This also means that if your camera starts in one room and then moves into another room, the first room's lights will still be on and the current room's lights will be off. Chief will keep the original room's lighting until you change anything in the model or you hit the Refresh Display tool (or F5). By opening just about any dialog box or even just selecting an object and moving it, you would force Chief to update the lighting to the current room.

So the short answer is that if you want your lighting to be up to date when your camera moves from one room to another, just hit F5.

[Robert2011]

Dermot, hitting F5 is a huge help, thanks. That solves 50% of my issue.

And thanks for letting me know what's possible.

By the way, I think that lighting is critically important. Not just window light but artificial lights and any lights. It's critical for me to be able to walk in one room and to see the lighting when looking through a door into adjacent rooms.

For a future idea I think that it would be huge if lighting could be seen in adjacent rooms.

I'm not going to get into why I think that, or to try to defend why it's important to me, cause who knows who else might agree, or not. Just saying that it's critically important to me. It'll be too late for me if it's ever implimented, so just sayin.

[moak]

A work around to show lights in other rooms is to break the walls connecting the rooms in locations that are not visible to the camera (essentially creating one big room)

Rendering for camera below will show lights in dining room, hall, and kitchen. Wall breaks circled in red.

[Dermot Dempsey]

You can also mark the wall as "no room def" so that you can fool the program into thinking you have one big room. You will probably then run into the 8 light limit and you may still not get the results you want.

The basic rendering engine built into HD Pro is only going to give you a pretty simple lighting model. If you need a more accurate representation of lighting, you may want to consider upgrading to Chief Architect Premier or Interiors. Both of these versions have our built-in raytracing engine which will use all of the lights in the model (including having sunlight shining through your windows). I would encourage you to download the trial version and play around with it (or call our sales department to discuss it further).