The Carrara manual describes how to manipulate the settings for tube lights, but it really doesn't say what they might be used for.  Can anyone clue me in? 

Sorry, Mark.  I don't get it.  What's it supposed to be?  If it's a fluorescent light casing, why is light shining out the side?

 I just really may be dense, but I can't figure out what a tube light is and what it's used for.  And I'd like to know, else I wouldn't have posted the thread.

Could you give a worded example, something along the lines of:  If you wanted to do , you could use a tube light in the following way:__.  You know, ultra-mini-tutorial like?  Or point me in the direction of such a tutorial?

Thanx.

No worries. I should have been a little more thorough in my explaination. Apologies. Yes, you can use it to make fluorescent lights - which is what I did quickly in the image above so it's probably not the best representation. Other usages would be to put a single tube light in an enclosed long hallway. That way, with a single bulb, you could have a consistent effect down the length of the hall (fall off, shadows, etc). If you had a light saber from Star wars sitting on a table and retracted the blade in an animation, you could animate the size of the tube light as the blade retracts. There really are tons of uses but you need to make up most of the uses yourself! Does that help? Mark

Aye!  Thank you.  It was embarassing to be losing sleep for so long over tube lights.

Hope your ArtZone chat went swell.

Cheers!

DOn't feel so bad, the Carrara Manual is pretty ambiguous about a lot of things :)

Well, the other issue is that there is no visible representation for the tube light in the assembly room. It looks like a bulb light, and erroneously scales like a bulb light. It takes a little experimentation to figure out how the "tube" is oriented and where it begins and ends (when I first started working with them I kept a small plane primitive handy to catch the light). Flourescent bulbs are most convincing when they are a whitish-green color. Also good for trimming your artdeco diner with neon. ;-)

This is one area that was better in Infini-D than it is now in Carrara. In Infini-D tube lights were actually visible--in the render. It was easy to make laser beams, light sabres, etc. Since you could actually see the tube, not just the light emanating from it. Not a true volumetric light, but it did render very fast and looked great. Wow!!, that brings back some memories.

I usually just use a cylinder primitive with a glow and then an anything glows.  I just wish that the aura effect didn't crash my renders.  It is hard to get a natural looking flourescent glow.  You would think they could make a different correctly shaped representation for the tube light.  It is just so basic a thing.

Tube lights and AnythingGlows were originally a DCG plugin, later absorbed by Carrara, but it's still pretty much just a plugin.... I guess this is why it has been neglected by the gui. It would be nice to update that sort of thing..., maybe an AnythingGlowsPro, heh heh. holly