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In a bid to better understand interior lighting, I'm running some simple tests.
Essentially, the goal is to better optimize our exterior night/dusk exterior views renders, as we tend to work on large master planning scheme views that contain tons of buildings and thousands of apartments. Given the time of day and mood required for such visuals we need to show that these buildings are occupied, so we must have lights in apartments turned on.
I always like to stick to as real world setup as is possible in my work, so I would usually create instanced vray disc lights (to mimic ceiling spot lights) space them out in one apartment room, raise them to just below ceiling level, group them and then proceed to copy the grouped instanced vray lights around scheme. Now, this is already a tedious job, but it gets to a point when for some reason Max starts to become slow and unresponsive with the number of lights in the scene (I'm talking view port and general max lag, rather than anything to do with rendering at this point). For example clicking on a group of lights can result in a 3-4 minute UI response when the scene is heavy with vray lights.
After a nightmare experience dealing a ridiculously large scene I gave up on that approach and I played around with the idea of using a mesh light instead. So, instead of creating a Vray disc light and instancing that around the scene in groups, I created a circle spline, converted it an editable poly, flipped the normal and copied the circle in element mode instead. So, we have the same layout of spotlights lights, just this one is an object of circle polygons acting as one light, rather multiple instanced vray disc lights. To my utter joy, this approach worked, copying the circle elements around the scheme was smooth and I experienced absolutely no lag whatsoever. Then the simple task of applying the vray mesh light to the one object!
The problem with this approach is, you have to crank up the power of the mesh light to unreasonable levels, crazy levels. I'm assuming this is because the light is being spread across many polygons (larger surface area). As a result buckets are getting stuck during a render over the lit areas even if the areas are not too bright, thus my render times have gone through the roof.
I guess the question is, what is the best approach to lighting many apartments up in large scenes. I've seen the use of light image planes on the interior walls of an apartment. This seems like a good idea, but the floor plans we work with are not always uniform and would mean creating many different image planes for every different apartment specification.
I've attached two images, one with a vray disc light emitting 1350lm, the second a circle mesh light with the same diameter and power, yet they show different results (the dimmer is the mesh light) to add, copying the mesh light circle around in element mode reduces the amount of light cast from the mesh light even further (again referring to my point about surface areas above).
Your thoughts and ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Essentially, the goal is to better optimize our exterior night/dusk exterior views renders, as we tend to work on large master planning scheme views that contain tons of buildings and thousands of apartments. Given the time of day and mood required for such visuals we need to show that these buildings are occupied, so we must have lights in apartments turned on.
I always like to stick to as real world setup as is possible in my work, so I would usually create instanced vray disc lights (to mimic ceiling spot lights) space them out in one apartment room, raise them to just below ceiling level, group them and then proceed to copy the grouped instanced vray lights around scheme. Now, this is already a tedious job, but it gets to a point when for some reason Max starts to become slow and unresponsive with the number of lights in the scene (I'm talking view port and general max lag, rather than anything to do with rendering at this point). For example clicking on a group of lights can result in a 3-4 minute UI response when the scene is heavy with vray lights.
After a nightmare experience dealing a ridiculously large scene I gave up on that approach and I played around with the idea of using a mesh light instead. So, instead of creating a Vray disc light and instancing that around the scene in groups, I created a circle spline, converted it an editable poly, flipped the normal and copied the circle in element mode instead. So, we have the same layout of spotlights lights, just this one is an object of circle polygons acting as one light, rather multiple instanced vray disc lights. To my utter joy, this approach worked, copying the circle elements around the scheme was smooth and I experienced absolutely no lag whatsoever. Then the simple task of applying the vray mesh light to the one object!
The problem with this approach is, you have to crank up the power of the mesh light to unreasonable levels, crazy levels. I'm assuming this is because the light is being spread across many polygons (larger surface area). As a result buckets are getting stuck during a render over the lit areas even if the areas are not too bright, thus my render times have gone through the roof.
I guess the question is, what is the best approach to lighting many apartments up in large scenes. I've seen the use of light image planes on the interior walls of an apartment. This seems like a good idea, but the floor plans we work with are not always uniform and would mean creating many different image planes for every different apartment specification.
I've attached two images, one with a vray disc light emitting 1350lm, the second a circle mesh light with the same diameter and power, yet they show different results (the dimmer is the mesh light) to add, copying the mesh light circle around in element mode reduces the amount of light cast from the mesh light even further (again referring to my point about surface areas above).
Your thoughts and ideas would be greatly appreciated!
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