couple questions

[percydaman]

How do maya lights like point light and so on work with vray with regards to shadows? Ive gotten some strange behaviour. If you turn on raytrace shadows, do they automatically use vrayshadows? If I choose raytrace and use the light radius setting to get a fuzzier shadow, and then switch to shadowmaps, it still renders the raytrace shadow.

Second question. put a map into an override slot in the render environment window. go to hypershade and go to textures tab, and r-click that map and choose select output nodes. After a few seconds, in your attributes window, you have a HUGE host of general vray settings, include many I've never seen before. Is this supposed to happen? It looks like there's alot of things in there you could potentially screw up.

[Morbid Angel]

as far as i know shadow maps are not suported in current vray. Why would you want to use them anyway?

the second thing is quite normal. It does not take my hypershade a couple of seconds. for me its instant.
What you are seing is just the way renderers are implemented into maya. It is the same for mental ray. You have to have a default vray settings node from where attributes are derrived.
If you switch to mental ray render and type in the script editor - select mentalrayGlobals; and open attribute editor you will see a similar general settings node for mr.

[percydaman]

thanks for the info. I haven't used shadowmaps in years, I was just wondering. So to answer the other question, all shadows are converted to vrayshadow at rendertime?

[vlado]

All shadows are V-Ray shadows, yes. There have been requests to support shadow maps and we will be looking into that.

Anything that V-Ray renders in Maya is written specifically for V-Ray; no Maya components are utilized during the rendering itself.

For the settings stuff, you are simply seeing the actual vraySettings node in the Attribute editor, without the nice Render Settings UI.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

just to clarify that...its not converting into vray shadow map. Rather its just using raytraced shadows.