 Hey everyone, it's EJ from iDesign.com here and I have a really quick tip for you today about a little secret feature inside of an area light that actually has its own built in softbox setting. So I should reiterate that this is only available in an area light. It doesn't show up in any omni light or infinite light, anything like that. So I'm going to choose an area light and I'm going to go to my light here. I'm just going to move this forward in front of our little text edge bevel text treatment setup and I'm going to just render that out and we have our text nice and lit but if I go into my area light details tab I have these two options here and one of them is the show and render and the other is show and reflection. So just for craps and giggles I'm going to show you what this show and render does. So you see we have this square shape here right and if I render this you can see that with that show and render it's very aptly named function our softbox or our area light shape that rectangle or square shows up in our render but we also have this other option here that says show in reflection so I'm just going to unselect that show and render and add this show and reflection and then I'll render this again and right now you really don't see anything but if you go to this visibility multiplier guy here let's just bring this up to about a thousand and let's render again. So now you can see if you look right here we have that square area light shape now showing up in our text reflection so I can go ahead and just adjust these handles to make our area shape bigger and that's driven by this area shape option here so right now it defaults to rectangle you can change the size and the x and the y all this good stuff so I'm just going to bring it bring out the size in the x and just kind of move it above a little above our text here and I'm going to render that again so you can see we have this nice reflection of our area light shape showing and reflecting off of our text so I can go and maybe rotate this a little bit so it's a little bit of an angle and move this down a little hit render you say we have you see we have this nice reflection of this softbox shape showing up on our text so that's all built into our light shape so what I used to do before is if I wanted this to show up I just make a plane and make it a child of the light and zero out all of these options here make sure that it's facing in the right direction and then adjust it this way and then I have to make my own material that's 100% luminance and throw that on that plane to get that softbox shape but with an area light you don't need to do that it's already built in so you can actually make that reflection even brighter and say go to about 2000 you see it's really getting really bright and you can even go into your actual softbox intensity and just overall brighten everything up so the nice thing about this area light shape is that you can choose you're not just limited to rectangle you can choose a disc and you can see that my disc is already scaled pretty pretty high in the X so you now have this nice if I render this instead of a straight softbox shape you now have this nice rounded softbox shape and I'm gonna bring my visibility multiplier down a little bit so you can see that we have this nice rounded shape we can go in it doesn't work with a line it works with a sphere so you render that out it really doesn't change all that much it's not all that much different from a disc but the nice thing is as you can define a spline that you want your softbox shape to be or a cube or you know whatever you want to do one other nice thing is if I go and just say let's make this a sphere with 50 centimeter size in X Y and Z what I can now do is go and clone this light and let's see here go to our cloner settings go to our radial and let's bring our radius up and let's change our plane from XY to XZ and so now we have all these area lights cloned around our softbox I'll render this so you can see our lights are a little bit too bright but you can now see our area shapes that are cloned in our reflection I'm just gonna bring down the intensity here and let's actually bring up our size to maybe 150 render this out again so you're seeing our softbox circular shape showing up here as well so probably need to jack up the visibility multiplier to about 2000 to make it show even more but the nice thing is that you can then clone that softbox shape you can change it to a rectangle again make it a tall rectangle you make it a little bit skinnier let's really bring up the visibility multiplier and so now you have this nice setup where you have all these softbox all these softboxes created from our area light shapes being reflected off of our objects so very handy very useful to actually just have this built-in show-in reflection area shape to create your own softbox without having to create a plane and adjusting it that way it's all built into your area light and I'm gonna reiterate again that this doesn't show up if you have an Omni you can see that you know we don't have those options there doesn't show up in infinite so it's only with an area light that you get this show in reflection and show in render options here so hopefully that helps you in your workflow and you can easily cast a nice softbox reflection on your objects by just using the built-in show in reflection options in your area lights