Native Standard Spotlight

[crazy homeless guy]

Native standard spotlight?

I often like to use a basic spotlight to create a special feel on exterior shots. The problem is that the Max standard spotlight is often very slow to render compared to a Vray sphere. I am wondering if there is a way to render a sphere as more of a spotlight with cone controls.

...alternate ideas are welcome as well. I have thought about creating custom IES profiles to simulate a very basic cone. This may work but it will be very cumbersome to tweak for view.

[DanielBrew]

Have you tried using a VRay plane light and setting the directional property to > 0.5?

[crazy homeless guy]

Nope. Is there somewhere I can learn more about the directional properties of the Vray light? It doesn't seem to be documented int he latest manual.
http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/200R1/light_params.htm

[joconnell]

It's literally like a spread control - 0 makes the light beam spread a full 180 degrees as per normal, 1 makes the light shine straight ahead with the rest in between!

[DanielBrew]

Basically the directional property takes a value between 0 and 1. When it is set to 0 (the default value) the plane emits light in a 180 degree hemisphere. As the value increases the light becomes more and more directional. When the value is 1 the light is completely directional, only emitting light normal to the light plane.

I hope that makes sense, you will probably have to try a few values and see if it works the way you want it to.

[DanielBrew]

F*@k I spent ages typing that on my phone!

[crazy homeless guy]

Ha. I appreciate the effort. Thanks for the explanation.

[tammo]

i dont understand this, i always thought normal spotlights with vray shadows are way faster then vray lights,
especially if you use lots of them, like for downlights in an office building.

[crazy homeless guy]

i dont understand this, i always thought normal spotlights with vray shadows are way faster then vray lights,
especially if you use lots of them, like for downlights in an office building.

They are faster than VrayIES lights but not as fast as a VrayLight Sphere. A light sphere simply shoots light in every direction, a spot light shoot slight in a focused direction.

[Deflaminis]

The only downside to using the vray plane light with directional is you don't get that spherical feel from it. If you map any sort of texture to a vraylight, your shadows go to crap so that's not much of a solution. It's a bug I hope they fix soon.

[vlado]

If you map any sort of texture to a vraylight, your shadows go to crap so that's not much of a solution. It's a bug I hope they fix soon.

Can you show me?

Best regards,
Vlado