I got the brilliant idea that I wanted to see a street light through the window. Then as I tried to get it to look just right I started to wonder just how brilliant that idea was.
Modeling it was challenging enough. I don’t have any interesting street lights near me for reference, though I did go outside and look at how they stood in relation to the height of my building. So the style of the street light, may or may not be something that exists. I mostly took bits of ideas and put them together. Lots of edge loops.
My biggest challenge was not in getting it to cast luminencense. I could do that. I just put an omni light inside the globe and gave it a near transparent frosted look. However, when I rendered it, it didn’t look like it was providing light of any kind. The globe looked dull.
I had to find a material that was self illuminating to get it to look like it was a light that was on.
Once I got a self illuminating material the trick was to set the lumes just right so it wasn’t too bright or too dark.
I suspect as I learn more about materials and lights that I will find a better way to do this. For now I’ve learned that if I want my light to look lit and provide texture to the scene as well as provide actual light as a light source, then I need a self illuminated material as well as an actual light source.
When I went to do the ceiling light, I had learned this already and it was much easier.
