I'm working on a house mod and am getting light effects beyond the designated radius for the light object.
Does anyone know how to estimate the real radius for different lights?


Pic shows the light radius in TEC in one room and that the light spreads past the radius to highlight
the wood beams, walls and floors of an adjoining room. All lights from the adjoining room were removed.
The more lights I add in the other room, the more this room is affected - even if I cover the door way
with a tapestry or other object. So, if the light spreads past the designated radius, what then is
the true radius?
[IMG]http://i51.tinypic.com/9qxu91.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i52.tinypic.com/a1rgbo.jpg[/IMG]

Morrowind uses a rather limited form of lighting that only calculates on the vertexes. If you have a large flat surface, it may throw that off.

As best I can tell from your screens, some of the vertexes fall within the range of some of the lights, so you are getting illumination. There's not really a way to prevent that, besides moving things.

As for adjoining rooms and tapestries, unfortunately MW doesn't calculate that sort of things, so lights work with a simple radius. You can't do proper room lighting just by blocking it with walls (no shadows). There's some work being done to improve that, but nothing much yet.

What you can do is use multiple lights with smaller radii and tweak the positions to light just one area better. With some work and care, you can get pretty good results.

Hey, thanks for the quick response, Peachykeen.

I actually had the whole room lit up light a Christmas tree until I noticed that the lights were
affecting the adjoining room - even caused one (only one) of the windows to glow. So I took
out all the lights and started over by reducing the radius of the lights near the door to 50.
This seemed to work. I had thought, however, that the further lights were placed from the
doorway, the more I could increase their radius. So I did - with a 250 - and more 250 lights,
yet the illumination effect still occurred as you see in the pics (not as bad as how I originally
had it, though). I'm sure I can create the effect I originally intended with lower radius lights,
so I'll try that. Thank you for the "illuminating" explanation, although I wish there were
something more to do about it.