hundreds of small chandelier lights: mesh lights or vray lights?

[Rob Burns]

I have an interior scene with dozens of large crystal chandeliers. Each chandelier is over 1.5 m in diameter and has hundreds of individual crystals. As well each one has 30-40 small light sources inside it. I started by using mesh lights for the light sources (small, low geometry spheres with the VrayLights mtl applied). I'm finding the render times very slow, especially if direct lighting is turned on. Would it be better in this case to use vray lights instead? Are vray lights faster or more efficient than simple mesh lights? Cheers.

[super gnu]

if its many many point light sources youd be far better using omnis. if you must use area shadows ( and with 40 individual lights id suggest not) then you can, but this is what will kill your rendertimes. vraylights are probably better than meshlights in this regard, but ominis are best id say.

[Rob Burns]

Thanks SG, will give it a try!

[Rob Burns]

just fyi, tried it with non-area shadowed omnis, vray lights and mesh lights, and of the 3 the omnis were actually the slowest by a large margin. Looks like vray lights are more optimized for use in large numbers.

[super gnu]

really? well that wasnt what i expected. to be honest ive never tested comparitively, but im very surprised by this result!

[themaxxer]

rendering.ru had a plugin in the pipeline to speed up renderings with a lot of light sources, but I don't know if they release it at all.

best regards
themaxxer

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I would fake it. Use few area lights to cast shadows and then few white planes to illuminate lights and reflections...

[pixelplume]

omni lights are treated like 6 spotlights welded together! Learned that from Ted Boardman many years ago.

[super gnu]

heheee! Ted Boardman i had a very nice evening with him once at the EUE in utrecht. what a top chap.

oh and that sounds strangely plausible about the omni/spotlight thing. typically 3dsmax hacky..

[Rob Burns]

yes, to recap my head to head comparison of lighting techniques, the order from fastest to slowest goes like this (keep in mind this is just for the chandelier lights, but holy crap I just did the count and there are 1641 of them!!)


1. spheres with vray light material without direct lighting on in the material
2. vray sphere lights

both of the above were relatively similar

3. Max omnis (much slower that the 2 above)
4. spheres with vray light material with direct lighting on in the material at 16 samples (extremely slow!)

here is the image for reference. The small chandeliers have 26 lights each, the large have 40. That is pretty close to the way they are lit in real life. I know it's a crazy amount of lights, but I tried a lot of things and couldn't find another way to light them that didn't look really bad.

[simmsimaging]

That seems to work well. Just curious if you tried VrayLightMaterial as an option? I would think that would be faster than a meshlight but maybe not?

/b

[Rob Burns]

Oh, that's what I meant by mesh lights: low poly spheres with the vray light material applied. Sorry for the confusion, I realize there is also a mesh type in the vray lights, haven't played with that tho.

[3ddesign]

Just curious - what is the material makeup of the crystals? This may have a great impact on render times. -Craig

[joconnell]

heheee! Ted Boardman i had a very nice evening with him once at the EUE in utrecht. what a top chap.

oh and that sounds strangely plausible about the omni/spotlight thing. typically 3dsmax hacky..

Don't suppose you were there last year? Half considering this year too!

[super gnu]

naa would have been a few years ago now, it was possibly even the first one i went to.. but i may have just imagined that part. if you go, say hi to Jamie (gwilliam of autodesk) from Robin.