Vray Light Mesh Renders Very Slow.

[chadstevens]

Hi all, I have a Navisworks file of an oil rig that I've set up to render in vray in 3ds max 2017, I've spent a bit of time converting all materials to Vray and just general clean up.

The file comes with Lights as geometry, so I can select all of them and convert to vray light mesh, this creates 1000's of light meshes and none of them are instanced so changing their values becomes very difficult along with the general mess it makes in the light lister, I think this also slows down render time (not sure).

When I try to render an interior shot the light cache will build but it takes ages and when the light cache is done the render buckets just sit for Hours on the same spot and that's with the noise threshold at 0.1, it does eventually render but it looks terrible, I've gotten around this problem by just creating a vray plane light and clone aligning (instanced) them to all the light positions, this makes rendering Much faster especially now with the adaptive lights in vray 3.5 so renders that would take maybe 6 - 10 hours now takes roughly 30 - 45 min.

My question is, is it possible to get the same speed using the vray light mesh and create them as instances as it would make the process much faster and the light would retain the same shape instead of just a vray plane light.

Cheers.

[Syclone1]

I do a lot of oil and gas related renders and on the rigs I have I mostly use the plane lights, its a bit of a pain in the a$$ at first but worth it in the long run esp if you are using the rigs in more than one project and I break the instances down to areas like mast, dog house, drill floor... so I can easier turn lights on and off in sections.

[chadstevens]

@Syclone1

Thanks for the reply, this is the way I do it aswell, but it would be much more fitting if I could use the geometry as the lights as it then emits in all the directions the actual light does and it looks more realistic than a floating plane .

I would like to know from the Chaosgroup if 1. is this indeed a bug? and 2. is it possible to make a vray mesh instance from tons of geometry? I have a feeling that the massive slowdown is because I have the Vraylight mesh as one light (so all the geometry is one light mesh) by being able to make light meshes instanced this should get around that problem

Just so it's clear this is the process I'd like to be able to go through.

1. select all the light Geo in the scene.
2. click the vraylight mesh icon in the vray tool bar (this creates a light mesh from selected items)
3. have the possibility to turn all those lights to an instance of one, instead of having 2000 different lights in the vray light lister.

Hope this clears things up.

Cheers.

[Syclone1]

Ah ok I see where you are coming from, I dont have an answer either but will watch to see what they say. Would be handy if that is possible esp for doing off shore rigs with a billion lights on them.

[Raven]

Create one light and then uses something like this to instance it to all the others
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/sc...ect-replacer-0