Light Utilities for V4.0

Summary: This plug-in adds several light manipulation commands in a new menu to Rhino V4

Lights in Rhino do not allow a great deal of control for positioning. These utilities add some commands that you may find useful for this.

There are some for rectangular lights (the plug-in calls them area lights for now) and some for spotlights.

Rectangular lights are the most difficult to use in Rhino so this plug-in lets you make some special ones that have handles and some commands to manipulate the handles. See below.

• Download Rhino Light Utilities

Unzip to a convenient location, then drag and drop the Light_Utilities.rhp file onto a Rhino 4.0 window to install it.

AreaLightPlace

• Places a rectangular light with a target point and a source location. Default size is 10 by 10 units but you can enter anything you like (square) and change the size later using AreaLightResize.

AreaLightResize

• Select the edge points on a rectangular light created by AreaLightPlace to resize the light from the center.

AreaLightOrient

• Select the center point of a light created with AreaLightPlace to wobble it around its target point. The light source point is constrained to a sphere.
• Select an edge point to swivel the light on its axis (center to target point).
• Select the target point of the light to wobble it around the center of the rectangle.

AreaLightSlide

• Select edge points of a light created with AreaLightPlace to slide it in the plane of the light.
• Select the middle point of the light plane to slide it in and out from the target point on its axis.

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The above work only on lights made by the first command, AreaLightPlace.

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SpotlightAngle

• Sets the cone angle of one or more spotlights numerically.

SpotlightPivot

• Wobble a spotlight around on its target point without changing the length of the light. The light source location is constrained to a sphere.

SpotlightSlide

• Slide a light in and out along its axis.

SpotlightTarget

• Aligns one or more spotlights to point at a user defined location.

SpotlightTargetObjects

• Aligns one or more spotlights to point at the center of one or more object's bounding box centroid.

The AreaLight manipulation tools are very much a prototype and fairly fragile. Please be sure not to delete the points (handles) that are grouped with the lights.

Please email pascal@mcneel.com with comments or questions.