Greetings forum!

So I have a distant light in my scene that I created in the SOP context. I then used the Scene Import LOP to bring that light into Stage and then attempted to render using Renderman. The light did not render. I even tried turning up the intensity to high values such as 50,000. No light was added to the render.

The next thing I did was to create a distant light directly in Stage. Same issues as previously.

Finally, I created an area light in the SOP context and pointed it toward the object I was lighting. I brought that into Stage via the Scene Import LOP and then switched the light type to be Distant. And it started rendering as expected.

Is the Scene Import LOP the issue here or is it the Distant Light LOP? Since creating an area light and changing the type to distant fixed the issue, I'm wondering if anyone else has had this issue with bringing in distant lights via Scene Import or creating Distant Lights directly in Stage

I think the issue here is a combination of RenderMan, the distantlight angle and the normalization flag. Based on some quick tests, it looks to me like, in RenderMan:

* if a distant light has angle set to 0 and normalization off, then you get no light *from that light*
* if a distant light has angle set to 0 and normalization on, then you get no light *from any distant/dome light in the scene*

Does this give you enough to work around the situation?

I've passed along a simple example of this to the RenderMan team at Pixar.