Best Practice for Lots of lights

[playford]

I'm creating an office environment using Vray and I have light units built. If I add a separate plain lighdt for the actual lights, rendering time goes through the roof, as this is a walkthrough does anyone have any ideas on what light setup to use or the best way to get round this problem?

Thanks

Mark Playford

[natty]

Hi

For interior office light setup it is best to use large lights and few of them to light the space. Store the lights with Irr map and set the subdivs to around 200, this will give you quick final rendertimes..

[playford]

Hi Natty,

Thanks for your reply. Thats the way I was thinking as well bit I wanted to try and get the light cone showing on the wall, but I think I will leave that out for the animation.
One problem is that if I use vray lights set to planes I'm not getting a decent shadow, What is the standard lights people use or does it differ from project to project.

Thanks
Mark

[MoonDoggie]

200 subdivs? Wow, that's 25 times default. I usually use subdivs stored with imaps at like 32 or even 64 if need be.

[RErender]

Natty's right, If the lights are stored with Imap then I'd say 75 is min. the difference in render time between 32, 75 or even 200 is very slight but below 50 noise can be evident.

[MoonDoggie]

excellent, thanks for the tip!

[natty]

Hi Natty,

Thanks for your reply. Thats the way I was thinking as well bit I wanted to try and get the light cone showing on the wall, but I think I will leave that out for the animation.
One problem is that if I use vray lights set to planes I'm not getting a decent shadow, What is the standard lights people use or does it differ from project to project.

Thanks
Mark

To Show a cone on the walls use an IES lights with shadows off ... try not to use to many though!

[deneb26]

thanks for the tip about subdivs.

ale

[sea2stars]

Yeah. Avoid IES lights if you have a large number of lights. If I need to show numerous cones, I usually toss in Max spotlights with a very large falloff, hotspot until it looks right, inverse square falloff and occasionally attenuation to fine tune the falloff and rendertime.

Sound about right to anyone else?

[natty]

Yeah that sounds ok , but using ies without shadows on will give you a proper caustic falloff and the shodows are really not needed ..

[playford]

Thanks for the replies.

I found a way, sort of.



The ceiling is model from a spline with a sweep modifier for the grid and the tiles are just a editable poly. The light units are separate and I have a VRay plane light above the ceiling and have excluded the light unit from that light so we can get the light cone.

It's worked quite well for this project and after the light cache and IR map has been calculated it renders an 1 min 30 a frame.

Thanks to everyone for your help.

Mark

[renderoo]

Mark great idea, I'm doing something similar this will come in handy.
Cheers