ceiling tile light fitting,

[t3dm]

hi all,

currently i just use standard max spot lights with a square cone when simulating ceiling grid light fixtures in a vray interior render.. mainly because there are alot of them, covering a large area..and need to render them fast!

interested to know how other people deal with these light fittings.. IES? projector mapped spots? vraylightmtl only?

thanx in advance.

[DaForce]

Well IES will be slow, so will vraylightmtl not to mention splotchy.

If its the lights I think your talking about, just use one big vray light to cover each group, and then you can light the inside up with just an omni or something set to only affect the lights model.

[Blitterswitch]

Forgive my misunderstanding but isn't that a method for fakeosity?
That is kinda how I used to work when I was using viz 3i.

[DaForce]

No, fakeosity was about using point lights to fake bounced light and area lights.

My suggestion was instead of using proper mesh lights which are not yet available (will be soon) he can substitute them with one big vray light or perhaps a few smaller ones and then use an omni to light up the housing or something similar if needs be.
Its a common way ot light up the place. However im not exactly sure what lights he is using so my solution may not work. If I can see what they look like I might be able to provide a better solution.

<edit>
Asumming he means something like this

Then what I said would work perfectly.

[Blitterswitch]

Ahh, I think I understand now. I think I misunderstood the original question.

[DanielBrew]

I do mainly commercial interiors so come across this kind of lighting a lot. And after a lot ot trial and error I have found using VRaylights in the way DaForce said works very well and renders very quickly if you use Ir map + LC and set the lights to 'store with Ir map'.



I use a simple mesh and a VRaylight in an assembly.



Looks like this when rendered...

Dan

[DaForce]

Only issue with store with IR map is it lowers the quality of the shadows. )not as accurate) But in alot of cases it still looks just fine.
So if you render without store with IR map ticked its a little slow but more details/accurate.

But yeah.. works well and easy to setup

[DanielBrew]

Only issue with store with IR map is it lowers the quality of the shadows. )not as accurate) But in alot of cases it still looks just fine.
So if you render without store with IR map ticked its a little slow but more details/accurate.

But yeah.. works well and easy to setup

You're right, and looking at the shadows in the image I've posted it looks like I unticked 'store with' for the final render.

Detail enhancement works well with this kind of lighting if you leave 'store with' on - less noise than my image.

[alexthg]

will this new feature of RC4 help in this kind of situation?

(*) "Cutoff" threshold parameter for VRayLight's allows to reduce render times in scenes with many weak lights;

what i mean is when we're using many vraylights to light up an entire floor space

[DanielBrew]

will this new feature of RC4 help in this kind of situation?

(*) "Cutoff" threshold parameter for VRayLight's allows to reduce render times in scenes with many weak lights;

what i mean is when we're using many vraylights to light up an entire floor space

I think it would but you might be surprised how quickily VRaylights render when set to 'store with irradiance map' . I've lit large spaces with several hundred light fittings in under 5 mins for test renders.

[Clifton Santiago]

I do as Daniel Brew suggests unless I have dozens of grid lights. In that case I use free spots with square light cone, and large vray area shadows to make it appear quite diffuse. And I will usually do like one spot for maybe 4 fixtures.

[t3dm]

Hi All,

yeh..that type of light fitting Daforce...

I have been using a square spot with vray shadows, over every light fixture that are within the cameras sight, then using larger spots in the distance to cover larger areas without rendering huge amounts of lights and shadows.. the reason i am re looking at this is that

here are some examples of that type of set up.. but looking to be a little softer and accurate now, but without slowing rendering down too much!! (the nirvana i can i am always trying to achieve eh!!)





when you look at a ceiling light near a wall, it usually gives off a quiet intense hotspot, something i think that a vraylight will smooth out too much... see below... of a typical intensity I am looking to achieve.. bu over a wide area.....

[beestee]

If you are willing to wait for the VRayLightMtl to render with clean settings, you can get that effect. I also wonder what would happen if a giant VRayLight was clipping into the fixtures what the effect would be, as well as render times...maybe a test is in order.

Anyway, this is an example of what I have done with the VrayLightMtl recently:

[DaForce]

That looks pretty good!!

Do all remember that proper mesh based vraylights will be in one of the newer releases eventually. Vlado is working on it ATM AFAIK.

So you could have something like beestee's render but without the problems of using vraylightmtl