Vray instancer to support scattering vray lights?

[joconnell]

Heya folks!

I've got a project where I have to render a christmas night time city scene with a looooooot of lights on trees. Like up in the hundreds of thousands. I did a quick test in vray 5 hotfix 2 on max 2018 by scattering particles on a teapot, using the instancer to scatter boxes on that and then swapping to lights. That gives me an unhandled exception in the renderer and occasionally kills my session of max. I might have to have movement in the trees so it'd be great to have the instancer working with an alembic source through vray proxy so I can have position data carried along too.

Cheers!

[Joelaff]

The latest ForestPack (I think still in beta) will scatter lights. It does have some limitations still, but might be worth checking out. I haven't tried it yet, been meaning to.

[joconnell]

Yep, loading it up now and great to see the support thread with a few new things that they want to load in!

[matanov]

Lights support for V-Ray Instancer is coming as well soon.

[^Lele^]

Heya folks!

I've got a project where I have to render a christmas night time city scene with a looooooot of lights on trees. Like up in the hundreds of thousands. I did a quick test in vray 5 hotfix 2 on max 2018 by scattering particles on a teapot, using the instancer to scatter boxes on that and then swapping to lights. That gives me an unhandled exception in the renderer and occasionally kills my session of max. I might have to have movement in the trees so it'd be great to have the instancer working with an alembic source through vray proxy so I can have position data carried along too.

Cheers!

Lights trigger *some* messaging in Max, progressively slowing it down, and i found a hard cap for them at around 150k nodes.
Then, regardless of RAM left, Max simply would crash and crash on any user interaction.
I was trying to reach a million at the time we were doing QA for the Adaptive Lights, and i failed miserably.
Bear in mind it may have been max 2018 or some such.
Things may have improved since then, but surely using implicit methods is going to take you (much) further.

[joconnell]

Yep, implicit sound far better. the only downside though might be that the aa detection of lights seems to be worse than geometry - I just finished a project where we were doing helicopter shots of las vegas at night so thousands of tiny light bulbs. Originally they were vray lights but they'd cause problems with flickering. We got more stable results by using self illuminated geometry in place of the lights with the same radius, they were much more stable. Admittedly there's some cases where it's pixel crawl so there's not much you can get vray to do, 3d motion blur made the biggest difference there to add a temporal aspect to the sampling, even better than going from 4k to 8k.

While we're on lights, do you think it'd be possible to get them to support layer visibility flags? Our pass manager is using layer visibility as our overall method and currently vray lights ignore this (or did in the last version I checked anyway!)

Great news on the instancer!

[joconnell]

Other quick requests - do you think you'd be able to do something like a VrayPointVector and VrayPointScalar texture? Say there was colour / intensity values burnt on to the point data you brought in, it'd be great to be able to feed that into each of the scattered lights!

[piotrus3333]

While we're on lights, do you think it'd be possible to get them to support layer visibility flags? Our pass manager is using layer visibility as our overall method and currently vray lights ignore this (or did in the last version I checked anyway!)

“render hidden lights” option? one of those good old awkward defaults.

[Joelaff]

Yeah, never understood this being on by default.

[joconnell]

“render hidden lights” option? one of those good old awkward defaults.

Not quite.

Here I have three lights on three layers (remember in my company we use layer visibility flags) and I have hidden lights off in my render dialog. The right light isn't visible since it's on a layer that's turned off and I have hidden lights off in my render settings. The middle light is on a visible layer with default flags so that renders correctly. The third light on the left is on a visible layer, but the layer is set to have visible to camera off - I expect contribution from this light but not to have it's source visible. If I were rendering a max object with this layer flag setup, it'd cast a shadow but not be visible itself. I pretty much want vray to use the visible to camera option in the layer properties the same way that the "invisible" option works in the light and how all other max objects work. I can get around this by various pre render scripts run on the farm but i'd love if the behaviour was in there by default.

Cheers!

[Joelaff]

That is what I would call a bug

[joconnell]

Yeah indeed. There's a few things i'd like to see changed about lights, we have a list

[vlado]

It will be easy to take into account the “Visible to camera” layer property for lights. If you have a list of other things, it will be good to show it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[joconnell]

It will be easy to take into account the “Visible to camera” layer property for lights. If you have a list of other things, it will be good to show it.

Best regards,
Vlado

Thanks Vlado! I think we've a list of bits in the studio so we'll get dave wortley to get them across!