Enhancement: Light cookies for specular lighting

[Laveig]

What would this enhancement be for?

Rendering

Describe your enhancement suggestion in more detail

There are several problems with clustered specular lighting when it comes to light strips. For example, light strips are rectangular, while speculars are circular.

What I suggest is adding light cookies for specular. This could work as an areal reflection, where fully white textures make speculars all around the light cone, and fully black don't produce any specular whatsoever. For example, making rectangular specular reflection would be as easy as using a horisontal rectangular cookie texture.

[Smaedd]

Light cookies already apply to specular, but from your wording it seems like you’re asking for area lights though, which I’m very surprised I couldn’t find an issue for, am I interpreting your suggestion right?

[Laveig]

No. Light cookies are not applied to specular, at least as far as I tested. I don't have a screenshot, but I made a rectangular light cookie texture, and while it did apply to the dynamic light, the reflection remained circular.
If it should work the way you described, then this is definitely a bug. I'm going to close this issue then, and open it as a bug.

[Smaedd]

I think you might be misinterpreting how light cookies work. They don't change the shape of the light, they only change the color of the light. For spotlights, that means there's still circular falloff, and cookies can't change that. If you want no circular falloff, that can be accessed currently via env_projectedtexture.

From what I can tell light cookies do work for specular lighting, as can be seen here:

This light has only specular contribution (direct has been disabled), and it visibly is using the cookie correctly