Vray Lights

[HMA_Steve]

Hello,
I'm pretty new to Vray and am doing an internal animation of a building.
I am using large vray lights (plane-type) on the ceiling on each floor plate to provide the light beyond what little gets in through the windows.

My main problem is that the building is an odd shape meaning I can't use one big square light but have to use 5 or 6 smaller ones but this then makes rendering much slower especially over 4 floors. Is there a way to create a vray light (plane-type) but in a shape other than square/rectangle?? If not any chance this might be added to a future release

Is there a better way of dealing with type of lighting? I have tried using self illuminated planes but you don’t have the subdiv control.

Any help greatly appreciated.
Steve

[Gijs]

I think this link is useful:

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...ic.php?t=10854

[rjw]

pity the link doesn't work - did anyone copy the info?
thanks

http://throb.net/site_main/LinearWorkflow.php

[trick]

http://throb.net/site_main/LinearWorkflow.html

[HMA_Steve]

Cheers for the link...
It was more the ability to light odd shaped floor plate using vray lights that I was interested in though.
For example... If you have a rectangular space you can use one rectangular vray light and get great lighting however if you had an odd shaped room, say a semi circular room then you have to use a few lights to cover the area and this increases the render time and is a bit of a pain.... what would be great is if you could shape the vray lights to your own shape.

[dgsantana]

you could try using the vraylighmtl and apply to any shape. we use this alot. it will give you area shadows. you will need the indirect illumination turn on.

best regards,
daniel

[Gijs]

Steve,

I know you were asking for different shaped Vraylights, but since that is more of a whishlist item, I thought it would be better to work on lighting technique. The technique described in the thread I posted, basically helps to get light in darker area's without having to use all kind of tricks and without the need to add many lights.

[flipside]

If you use the lights only to lighten up your space, use the 'store with ir map' option for them. This will be a lot faster and it doesn't matter much if you have 1 or five lights in the scene.

If you don't want that, lower your subdiv value for all your fill lights. One big plane needs more subdivs than 5 smaller ones to get a similar result.

[priad]

Flipside solution is good, I have an other where you can try to:

Do a printscreen of your scene then in photoshop you make the area in black and white (white where you want to light).
after you put it in a vray lightmtl and you adjust your map as you want to make a good lighting.
the mtl must be putted on the perfect shape of your scene like a extruded line.
Exclude the shape extruded line of the camera, shadows and something else .
It's a technique wich works.

PS: and ok bad english again .

[HMA_Steve]

thanks for the replays... ill give the suggestions a try.