Area light representation

[anchovy]

Pardon the comparison but I wanted to take a min and share with the group here one of the things I really liked about Brazil. As a long time user of both BZ and Vray Ive come to appreciate both renders tremendously. Id love to see some of the best things of the now deceased render influence VRay where its appropriate. The developers of Brazil spent a fair amount of time crafting the gizmo/screen representations of the lights and cameras. I have a couple images to share and I think you will immediately see how nice some of features are.




1. You can see that the area light has a positionable target which makes it a lot faster to place a light than just rotations. The target is also an option.
2. The light can have its own color and an override to the system color, making it easy to see against the view port.
3. Virtual barn doors control the hotspot and falloff just like the standard lights. But more importantly there is a great visual representation of what those angles are, no guessing. I find this the single biggest thing I miiss about the brazil lights.Its a lot more like lighting a set if you can see where the lights going to go.
4. Attenuation if used has a visible representation. with custom coloring for the UI
5. The light representation can also be colored the color of the light itself letting you quickly see just what color a light is going to cast.

We spend a good deal of time interacting with lights and the current vray light gizmos give just enough info to get the job done. I know coding for the gizmos is not great fun but Id love to see some love given to them in the future.

Thanks!

-Michael

[vlado]

1. You can see that the area light has a positionable target which makes it a lot faster to place a light than just rotations. The target is also an option.

This is already done for the next SP.

3. Virtual barn doors control the hotspot and falloff just like the standard lights. But more importantly there is a great visual representation of what those angles are, no guessing.

While we don't have these, we did add a viewport representation of the light directionality.

For the rest, we will definitely consider them.

Best regards,
Vlado

[anchovy]

Along similar lines the Brazil camera had a great visual representation for its gizmo. I especially like the curved focal plane as well as the controllable shaded opacity so you can easily see what is falling on the focal plane.



Thanks

-Michael

[anchovy]

Vlado-

Thanks for the consideration. I think it will really improve scene setup.

Thanks

-Michael

[Laserschwert]

And adding to that it might be nice if we could change the view to a VRayLight as well, just as we can do with Max's own spotlights. It's sometimes easier to position a light and set its falloffs when looking at the scene from the light's perspective.

[anchovy]

ill second that.

-Michael

[Undersky]

Ahh, Brazil. Good times, good times =) Had forgot about how fast it was to position lights. Just slam out your area light - click - position your target - click. Then I believe the main light was selected so you could just position the light correctly. Love it!

Although I don't use 3ds Max anymore, but hopefully V-Ray for Maya soon, I second this and would like it in Maya aswell =)