Drive Lighting

[beestee]

This is a recent project used to display a possible lighting scenario for a drive lane in a commercial parking lot.



I had to send the renderings at night so that I wouldn't tie up our nodes all day long. This render was timing out over backburner(over 600 minutes) and using too much RAM for most of our coumputers to render it. I had to use small buckets(16x16) and low irr and lc settings. I think most of the issue is that I am using custom web photometric lights(my first venture into photometric lighing) and there are quite a few of them in this scene. I had vray area shadows on all of them, and it looked great, but it was taking far too long to render.

[priad]

I like it!

[Clifton Santiago]

Looks good. Though I am thinking you could get similar results with just max spots, and it might render faster.

Proxying the trees will help with memory, but render much slower. Are you using 2d displacement on the grass? That will slow everything to a crawl and max out memory.

[beestee]

Thanks, priad and Clifton

I switched the lights over to non-photometric spots and the rendertimes went waaaay down, under an hour with nearly the same result. I tried the non-photometric spots with VRay area shadows and the times went right back up

This is a feature of one of the fixtures that I modeled. The highlights look off because the fixture is excluded from the shadows of the light that is placed within the fixture.

[Clifton Santiago]

Sexy shot...

All your trees all unique copies? Try instancing just one and rotating and scaling to introduce variation. With the night lighting it shouldn't be too obvious.

Oh, and is your lamp excluded from shadow casting? The light might be getting confused with the geometry so close to its starting point. ...just guessing.