3.7.3  The Cylindrical Light Source

Spotlights are cone shaped, meaning that their effect will change with distance. The farther away from the spotlight an object is, the larger the apparent radius will be. But we may want the radius and falloff to be a particular size no matter how far away the spotlight is. For this reason, cylindrical light sources are needed. A cylindrical light source is just like a spotlight, except that the radius and falloff regions are the same no matter how far from the light source our object is. The shape is therefore a cylinder rather than a cone. We can specify a cylindrical light source by replacing the spotlight keyword with the cylinder keyword. We try this now with our scene by replacing all three spotlights with cylinder lights and rendering again. We see that the scene is much dimmer. This is because the cylindrical constraints do not let the light spread out like in a spotlight. Larger radius and falloff values are needed to do the job. We try a radius of 20 and a falloff of 30 for all three lights. That's the ticket!