Heavy use of VrayLightMat

[m_hinks]

Hi all,

I think I might have seen this talked about before, but I can't find anything on the search.

I am lighting the inside of an underground walkway. The lighting is from two sources, strip lights behind cladding on the walls to act as uplighters, and a central strip light running down the middle of the tube.

When I have used vray lighting in the past, I have ended up with over 100+ lights and the render times die. I am wondering if I can get away with using only geometry with lightmat to light the whole scene. Are there any problems with this method, and any particular settings that I can concerntrate on to get the quality of light.

I want to use real world camera settings, so I imagine Ill need very high values for the lightmats!

Thanks

[fabriceb]

I've been getting satisfying results using VraylightMat recently. Here's a list of things I would advise:
-try and avoid using small objects as light sources
-to create specular highlight, I use Omni lights if diffuse turned off
- I don't use real world cameras, but my values range from 0.5 to 6-7 for the vray light mat.
VraylightMat isn't perfect by any means but for me it works really well in the sense that I can have billions of light sources and it doesn't affect the render time on bit. (or doesn't seem to anyway).
I can't think of anything else for now....

[m_hinks]

Thanks Fabriceb,

Some good points there. Im expecting values of at least 1500+ with an exposed camera. I do wonder whether the value will need to be changed depending on the size of the strip light. for example, I make a lightmat at 1000, and put it on a tube 1m long, and works nice, then put same mat on a 10m tube, will the light given off be the same, or will different sized objects need different values for same power? Ill have to test!

Thanks

[gfa2]

I've noticed an increased amount of noise and GI artifacts when using the Vray light material. Anyone else?

[jonahhawk]

There is a formula to find the "proper" value for a given surface area. You can use the Measure utility to find the surface area.

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...t=surface+area