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Stacking Up Multiple Dome Lights

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  • Stacking Up Multiple Dome Lights

    Hi,

    I'm looking for a way to stack up multiple dome lights / use multiple dome lights at the same time (either in an additive way or using alphas). It does work in an additive way for direct light contribution, however in reflections (and camera rays) only one dome light is visible at a time. The "Dome Tex A" has no effect on that (with area lights, the specified alpha works like expected).

    I agree that in a lot of cases it makes sense to map isolated light sources on separate area lights, however I find it very useful to split a lat/long image into say 2-3 separate lat/long images, each one containing just bright pixels in a specific area of the original map (the rest being black or cut out in an alpha) and plug that into multiple dome lights. It's a super fast way to achieve interactive intensity control for different areas of the lat/long and also pass on this control to comp with light selects. I've recently used this technique in mantra a lot and it was very efficient.. would be great to have this option in V-Ray, too.

    I'm also interested in your opinion, if this does make sense in terms of render efficiency. I did some comparisons with multiple env lights vs. multiple area lights in mantra and the env light setup was more efficient. So in a scenario where it's ok that light sources are infinitely far away, multiple dome lights would be a viable option.

    Best regards,
    Manuel




    www.hdr-sets.com

  • #2
    I can see this being useful. We generally don't render in that way much but I had some cases where it would have been nice to have that kind of control. We solved the "problem" otherwise back then. I don't know if this is a niche problem but I can see and have experienced some cases where this would have been useful.
    Software:
    Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1
    3ds Max 2016 SP4
    V-Ray Adv 3.60.04


    Hardware:
    Intel Core i7-4930K @ 3.40 GHz
    NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 (4096MB RAM)
    64GB RAM


    DxDiag

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