— Menu —

A properly made cone primitive can act as more than one invisible light source.

'Multi-Lites' are my name for a concept of using different faces of one or more Adobe Atmosphere model primitives as separate light sources. The idea is to make one primitive shape do the work of two or more light sources.

By using faces of different sizes and colors at different distances from your lighted model objects, you can have simulated spotlights or simulated flood lights, and more than one color of light can be applied to your 3d modeling scene.

Below: Two cone primitive model "Multi-Lites" each act as both simulated spotlight and simulated floodlight, applying light of several colors to a white environment containing white model objects. The two cone primitive light sources are invisible.


Below: Here the two cone primitive "Multi-Lites" are visible for your inspection.

What to Do, Notice and Investigate

1. Notice how a small, bright face, close to its light receiving object, simulates a spotlight. A larger, dimmer face, farther away, looks like a flood. A cone primitive shape allows different size faces as light emitters.
2. See how the colored faces affect the white model room and white objects. It would also be possible to light this model with only one cone.
3. For this to work, you must control and balance 4 different things:
   1. The size of each important cone light source face
   2. The brightness of each important cone light source face
   3. The color of each important cone light source face
   4. The distance of the faces from their light receiving objects

Notes on Adobe Atmosphere "Multi-Lites"

This is not my original idea. I saw something like this done in an Adobe Atmosphere developer's example worlds.

Atmosphere does not yet support "light types", that is, different lights for use as model "spotlights", model "floodlights", etc. But this is one way of simulating light types.

Very even lighting is possible also, as shown below, where a single Multi-Light was used: