Lights

Lighting Overview

Lighting in Omniverse Kit based apps offers a wide variety of lighting options and capabilities. Here is a quick look at how you can expect to interact with and manage lighting.

Light Sources

Light sources in Kit based apps are made to realistically emulate real-world lights.

Light Types
Real World Equivalent

Distant Light
Direct Sun/Moon light

Sphere Light
Light Bulb

Rect Light
Rectangular Panel Light

Disc Light
Circular Panel Lights and Spotlights

Cylinder Light
Neon/Fluorescent Light Tubes

Dome Light
HDRI Skysphere (Background) lighting

Distant Light

Distant lights are parallel rays of light useful for showering an entire scene in a directional light. Meant to emulate lights infinitely far away, shadows cast with type of light will be hard edged and rather harsh compared to other lights. Ideal for Sun/Moon light, distant lights are generally a critical element to any outdoor scene.

Distant Light

Sphere Light

Sphere lights emit light in all directions from a central ball (not a point). The softness of the shadows (and overall intensity) are dictated by the radius of the central ball. Sphere lights are effective replacements for light bulbs.

Cylinder Light

Light Specific Properties
Usage

Radius
Source Sphere Radius

Treat as Point
Makes the sphere size infinitely small

Rectangular (Rect) Light

Rectangular lights are capable of emulating light generated from a panel. The rectangle can be adjusted in width and length to accommodate any ratio from thin rectangle to square shape. This affect overall light power and shadow softness.

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Light Specific Properties
Usage

Height
Depth of the light source (x value)

Length
Length of the source (y value)

Projector light type
Enables focusing a textured light like a projector. Scale the light as desired to adjust the focus area.

Note

The Texture File functionality is supported in RTX - Real-Time mode only if Sampled Direct Lighting is enabled.

Disc Light

Similar to the rect light the Disc light emulates panel lighting but in the shape of a circle. Size is controlled by radius which affects overall light power as well as shadow softness. If shaping is used, the light acts as a traditional spotlight and has specialized controls to adjust the shape and color of the lights falloff.

Disc Light

Light Specific Properties
Usage

Radius
Radius of the disc.

Focus
A control to shape the spread of light. Higher focus values pull light towards the center and narrow the spread.

Focus Tint
Off-axis color tint. This tints the emission in the falloff region. The default tint is black.

Cone Angle
Angular limit off the primary axis to restrict the light spread.

Cone softness
Controls the cutoff softness for cone angle.

Note

Increasing Shadow samples per pixels in Rendering Settings smooths light falloff at the cost of render speed.

Cylinder Light

Tubular lighting useful in emulating neon/fluorescent light tubes and other linear omnidirectional lighting.

Cylinder Light

Light Specific Properties
Usage

Length
Width of the rectangle, in the local X axis.

Radius
Radius of the cylinder.

Dome Light

Used for image-based (background) lighting when supplied with a texture. Dome lights allow you to easily light your entire scene with a high or low dynamic range image.

Dome Light

Light Specific Properties
Usage

Texture File
A color texture to use on the dome, such as an HDR (high dynamic range) texture intended for IBL (image based lighting).

Texture Format
Specifies the parameterization of the color map file.
-automatic: Tries to determine the layout from the file itself. For example, Renderman texture files embed an explicit parameterization.
-latlong: Latitude as X, longitude as Y.
-mirroredBall: An image of the environment reflected in a sphere, using an implicitly orthogonal projection.
-angular: Similar to mirroredBall but the radial dimension is mapped linearly to the angle, providing better sampling at the edges.
-cubeMapVerticalCross: A cube map with faces laid out as a vertical cross.

Common Light Properties

Common Light Properties
Usage

Color
The color of emitted light, in energy-linear terms.

Enable Color Temperature
Enables using color temperature.

Color Temperature
Color temperature, in degrees Kelvin, representing the white point. Lower values are warmer, higher values are cooler.

Intensity
Scales the power of the light linearly.

Exposure
Scales the power of the light exponentially as a power of 2 (similar to an F-stop control over exposure).
The result is multiplied against the intensity.

Normalize Power
Normalizes power by the surface area of the light. This makes it easier to independently adjust the power
and shape of the light, by causing the power to not vary with the area or angular size of the light.

Diffuse Multiplier
A multiplier for the effect of this light on the diffuse response of materials. This is a non-physical control.

Specular Multiplier
Adjusts the amount specularity the light contributes to.

Light Linking

In Omniverse, Lights can be linked to surfaces allowing individualized response to specified lights.

Note

Light Linking is a specific utility of Path Tracing and only works in PT Mode.

Light linking can be used when very specific control over scene lighting is needed by specifying which lights contribute illumination or shadows to an object.

Property Panel Settings

Under the Light Link and Shadow Link menus for a light, primitives can be included or excluded. The underlying mechanism for these lists are USD collections. The expansion rules control how primitives are included or excluded from these collections. explicitOnly links to one specific primitive, expandPrims includes the children of the specified primitive, and expandPrimsAndProperties includes children and attributes, though attributes are not currently supported in the light linking paradigm. The exclude collation can act as a subtraction boolean against the include list. If the expansion rule is set to expandPrims and the top of a hierarchy is selected as s single selection, then the exclude list can be used to remove lower level objects from the include list.

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