Perhaps someone should update the docs to take care of this slight
misconception of area_lights, which pops up every now and then...

Arealights only affect *shadows*, not *where the light is coming from*.

In effect, the lightsource is still a pointlight. Illumination is rendered
like you used a pointlight. Arealights only go off as soon as some shadow
needs to be processed, *then* it checks the area, how much of the points
illuminate the shaded area, and how many really don't.

There are a few option to go round this: like Tom Melly suggested, use
radiosity. Still, Radiosity has a large impact on the lighting of a scene in
its entirety, and takes a lot of tweaking to get it right (you might want to
check my website, http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights, I've made some
experiments on the standard Cornell-Box). What you might want to do is take
several lightsources (this time, don't use area_lights though) and actually
*build* a spherical area_light. To do this, you might want to use my
ESP-Macro (available in my downloads section), which will generate positions
for an even distribution on a sphere for an arbitrary amount of sources.
Note though that lighting calculations and thus rendering time will rise, as
well as parsing time (preparing the light-buffers etc when using lots of
lights and objects, along with the parsing of the macro). Don't forget to
put no_shadow on the sphere you're placing it in then, unless it's
transparent and is supposed to somehow affect the light.

-- 
Tim Nikias v2.0
Homepage: http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights
Email: tim.nikias (@) gmx.de


> Hey
>
> Here is the noob again asking questions.
>
> Ive got 2 looks_like { CrystalBall } lightsources.
> They are area_light <5,0,0> <0,0,5>5,5
> When i render and watch the output it seems like that the light is only
> emitting from specific points inside the crystal ball.
> Im trying to get a constant glow out the ball, which lets of the same
amount
> of light in every direction. Ive tried without area_light too, but that
> doesnt seem to fix it.
>
> any ideas would be appreciated :)
>
> TIA
>
> Christian
>
>


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