Vray light portals....yet again

[Giovanni]

Ok, so I did search for "portal" and got some infos, but I just want to make sure.

I have some recessed cans on my ceiling. The model has little spheres inside the cans. The material for the spheres is a vraylightmat.

The rendering shows the lights fixtures nicely "lit", which means you see bright light inside the cans. So far so good.

Now, in order to get some lighting actually on the floor, I need to incresse the vraylightmat A LOT. This increases render time and the quality is terrible.

So, I placed a long vray rectangular light under the line of recessed lights, sort of to trace the lights. Then I set it to portal, simple mode.

My understanding is that the portal light will read its intensity from the GI based vraylightmat behind it. Correct?
Or it will simply take its intensity from the GI environment (which also illuminates my scene)?

The rendering is much smoother, but the problem is the light distribution is really not following the can light fixtures. I was hoping to see some cones of light on the walls but I think the portal light is simply making light along its rectangular, enlongated shape.

Do I need to create a smaller, square portal light for every can light fixture?

But at that point the whole idea of having "ready made" model lights fails, becuase I may as well just put spot lights in my cans....

Vlado, how far are we from an actual light emitting mesh?

Thank you

regards

gio

[bhchllc]

I think the "simple" mode uses the enironment light rather actually evaluating the light coming in from the backside of the portal so you may want to turn that off.

We use the vray light material as you do to light up the inside of the can but then use photometrics under them to actually illuminate the space.

[MoonDoggie]

I fake it. I set my vraylight mat to be just over 1.0 float and put max spots just above the ceiling which exclude the ceiling from both shadow casting and illumination. Another solution would be to take out the vraylight mat, and actually put vray sphere lights in each can, though the earlier approach _will_ be faster.