Light from movie screen?

[gwnelson]

Trying to develop home theater views & can't generate enough ambient light in dark room to see screen decal like a movie would display. Any ideas?

[sbrown]

You could try making the material of the screen self illuminating. Look thru someof the glass materials you'll find some that are illuminating. Or try adding a number of studio lights in front of the screen but make them lower powered.

[gwnelson]

Thanks, Scott. I'll post results if they're not too embarrassing.

[patricks]

On your decal for the screen, click Edit Type and then Edit Decal Attributes. There you can give the decal a brightness, set a finish, luminance, etc. There is actually an LCD screen preset that I used when creating a Revit model of an iPhone 3GS awhile back.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v38/PatrickGSR94/Misc/iPhone/iPhone05.jpg

[patricks]

Looks like I had to create a movie screen family as a light fixture family with rectangular light emission pattern. Pretty easy to do. The trick is getting the decal on the screen for the image. I placed a decal on the face of the family in a project, and it works fine as long as you set the decal to NOT illuminated, and set it to some transparency value. The problem is that transparency on the decal washes out the color REALLY bad.

Try this project and family to see what you can do. Update the decal type definition in the project with the image of your choice, or use the image I posted above.

[gwnelson]

Thanks, Patrick - I'll give the illuminated screen a try. I'm googling a movie screen shot now - did you have any trouble finding something?

[patricks]

I just made the movie screen family this morning after reading your post. :) I was just using that iPhone render image on the screen, not an actual movie shot.