Houdini 21.0 Nodes Copernicus nodes

Pyro Light from Points Copernicus node

Builds a light field of points lighting a VDB.

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Since 21.0

This operation constructs a light field that stores the intensity of light that reaches each voxel. The source of the light is point lights specified as an input or a parameter.

Light operations can be chained together to accumulate multiple light sources and used as an input to the Rasterize Volume COP to render a VDB as lit smoke.

Parameters

Light Type

Directional

Directional lights are considered at infinity. All the light rays will be parallel. When points are used as a source, the direction from the points to the origin is the direction of the light.

Non-directional lights are point lights emanating from the 3d location.

Light Position

When no point geometry is provided, this is the center of the light when not directional.

Light Direction

When no point geometry is provided, this is the direction of the light when directional.

Light Radius

Point lights have a singularity at their location, so if a point light is inside a volume it will become infinitely bright at that location. This regularizes the falloff by treating the light to be approximately a sphere of this radius.

This will be multiplied by the pscale attribute on points.

Shading

Color

The color of the light.

This will be multiplied by the Cd attribute on points.

Intensity

The linear brightness of the light.

Exposure

An exponential brightness of the light. Each 1 value higher is 2 times the brightness.

Density Scale

Scales the density VDB values, causing it to occlude light swifter.

Quality

Steps Per MipMap

When tracing the occlusion rays, the MipMap level will be dropped each time this number of steps has been run. This will turn the rays into cones so result in blurrier shadows farther from the light source.

Max Steps

The maximum number of samples that will be done while tracing an occlusion ray. Since higher MipMap levels have larger step sizes, the distance covered will be larger than just the voxelsize times the maxsteps.

Inputs

density

A Float VDB storing the density to occlude light. This is also the topology used to build a light field. The light field will only be present where density was activated.

mipmap

An optional Float VDB MipMap from a Packed MipMap COP. If not provided, it will be computed internally.

light

An optional Vector VDB storing the amount of illumination at each voxel. The new light will be added to this, allowing lights to be chained.

points

An optional Geometry whose points will be treated as light sources. Every point needs to be cast against every voxel, so care should be taken not to use too many points.

Outputs

light

The light that reaches each voxel from the ambient sources.

See also

Copernicus nodes