VRayIES areas lights - noisy

[simmsimaging]

So I finally had some time to come back to playing with VrayIES area lights. I'm trying to get nice softbox type lights but with that natural IES distributions. For the lighting it works well, but the reflections of the VrayIES lights in glossy materials are super grainy, and even at high sub-d render slowly.

Even if I crank the shape subdivisions up to 100 they are still pretty noisy. Is there some way to optimize this? (I did think to turn of 'use shape' and make a reflector plane to substitute for reflections, but then I lose area shadows as well)

Any help appreciated.

b

[vlado]

This is because the IES light will try to produce area specular hilights on the material; in the absence of an actual light shape, this may require quite a lot of samples to clean the result. I could probably try to add an option (like we have in V-Ray for Maya) to produce the speculars as though from a point light, which will take care of the noise.

Best regards,
Vlado

[simmsimaging]

That would probably do the trick nicely. I guess I'd then have to use the reflector plane idea to get the reflection shape right as well?

[simmsimaging]

Hey Vlado-
I have been playing around trying to get the best light options and I really like what I'm getting with the VrayIES as an area light. It just gives some nicer variation than plane lights, and I'm not getting quite the same result with image mapped plane lights (not yet anyway, but testing is fairly slow going).

Is it possible to simply add an option to VrayIES to not affect specular? Would that take care of the noise problem and still keep the reflection shape? I try to avoid using fake specs anyway.

I guess what would be ideal is a fusion of the VrayLight and the VrayIES into one light, but I'm sure that's a lot harder than it sounds.
b