For something like under-cabinet LED strips, would you use the floor and ceiling panels approach as a starting point, or is it better to add local light sources just where the strip illuminates the worktop?
For only the led light on the counter top you can use a single invisible hemisphere that you resize so the bottom of the sphere contours where the light touches the counter. That is what I did with the streetlights. The high streetlight has a single invisible hemisphere that is resized to outline where the light goes. It's a little elevated to avoid a sharp edge where the light touches the floor. It it's a long led-light you can one or two extra hemispheres.For the general lighting of the room you can use the light panels. It depends if you want to render or use AI to generate a photo. You can test-render by not using the highest setting, that should go a little faster. You can also try multiple panels instead of hemispheres. A panel is a single face that produces light, a hemisphere has many faces and each one acts like a light panel, thus it takes much more processor time to render.
Alternatively you can use this little library I quickly created with two half-tube light sources. One visible, one invisible. You can stretch, resize, and elevate how you want. These only have 6 faces, much, much less than a hemisphere. You can place the invisible one halfway between the counter top and bottom of the LED strip. That is what you se in the image, the invisible light is at elevation 120cm. (The light is resized to 50cm wide, 4cm deep and 1cm high, light power 8%).
----------------------------------------
Dodecagon.nl
1300+ 3D models, manuals, and projects
