Spotlight not rendering

Hey All,

I’m having an issue with rendering some spotlights… I would like them to shine from the bottom up on some surfaces and extrusions, but it seems that they don’t show when I render, they are however showing in the perspective viewport. If the spotlights are more directly facing what I want to light, then it renders fine. I don’t have a lot of experience with lights so can’t tell if this is some weird bug or if there is an explanation I am missing. Tried to mess with some light and shadow settings but didn’t seem to make it work. Ive attached a couple screen shots and a sample file.

Thanks for the help!

spotlight-sample.3dm (4.3 MB)


  • Your spotlights are below the automatic ground plane
  • Your spotlights have shadow intensty set to 0%, leave it at 75% or higher
  • The skylight is pretty strong

With the ground plane removed and shadow intensities set back to 100%:

And with further skylight turned off:

Raytraced viewport mode is the same engine as Rhino Render. In my case I have set viewport sharpness a couple of notches lower to keep it responsive. But it should give you a good idea of how the final render will look like.

Thanks you Nathan!

I wasn’t aware of the automatic ground plane setting… hard to see lights when they are under ground. Appreciate the advice for the other settings too.

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