Only 8 vray lights in viewport???

[xgastudios]

Hi all,

Back at the office we have run into a strange problem. In our viewports only 8 vray lights effect the scene, the rest don't. All the lights render just fine, just not in the viewport. Is this an issue with Vray Max or my ATI card?

brand new boxx running dual 64 AMDs
Max8 Sp3
Vray 1.49.07
ATI V3100 with latest drivers

Thanks for the help!

Matthew

[xgastudios]

Ah,

I just ran across a CgTalk post that said that this is a Max issue. To be honest, this makes no sense to have only 8 lights working in the viewports.

Oh well....

Matt

ps here is the CgTalk post

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthre...03#post3519403

[RErender]

It does make sense, rendering realtime lighting is computationally expensive. It is not a limitation of max it is a limitation of the video card.

[studioDIM]

It's a bit of both, i guess

I had a hardware beta of the glorious geforce 256, the first card to have T&L in hardware.
The limit for that card was, guess what, 8 realtime ligts in either ogl and DX.

By now i'd expect cards to handle MANY more lights in realtime (hell, an ati 9600 did realtime IBL, with multi-tap Dof and moblur...), but the max drivers never got an update worth mentioning, and it remained stuck at 8.

Other apps might definitely handle more lights in realtime where the card allows for it...

Lele

[vlado]

I think that is a limitation of graphics cards and/or drivers.

Best regards,
Vlado

[instinct]

Having done some opengl coding i'd say it's most definately a hardware limit (or a specification limit actually). Nowadays there are indeed ways around it as used in modern games. That's mostly done via shaders tho, and that's nothing i'd want in my viewport as it would slow it down in general i guess.

Thorsten

[dbuchhofer]

yea, tis a hardware issue..

Bobo has a script somewhere to allow you to tell max WHICH 8 lights to use for the viewport lighting. i'm sure you can find it through scriptspot.com if you're interested.

[xgastudios]

Thanks for the replies guys, and thanks Dave for the info on Bobo's script, I'll check it out.

Matt