Animated light angle in direct light doesnt work

[seandunderdale]

Ive got a timelapse that I cant really use the vray sun and sky for, so Im using a custom built HDRI time lapse from vue for the sky and a direct light for the sun.

My issue is that Im animating the light angle in the raytrace shadow rollout, and its not rendering the animated soft to hard shadow in batch render. It will render in the viewport, but if I submit to the farm, or render cmd line locally, it does not work.

I made a simple test and animated a direct light moving across a sphere that sits on a plane. Animated the light angle from 0 to 15 over 24 frames. In vray the shadow does not change. In Mental Ray it does.

Anyone else had this issue?

Cheers,

Sean

[yolov]

Hi,

Can you share the simple test you've made here, it'll be helpful to us, because I tried rendering in batch cmd, batch maya, standalone and viewport both with and without DR and I can't get that result.
Also, it would be good to know what version of V-Ray and Maya you're using (and OS).

Thanks in advance!

[seandunderdale]

Hi Yolov,

Im using Maya 2013 on Windows 7 pro. Vray version 2.10.01

Ive attached a scene, and a mov showing what my render looks like.

shadowTest.zip

[yolov]

I see. I ran a test and it actually doesn't work properly with that version. You could try a nightly build (contact our support@chaosgroup.com to arrange access in case you don't have any) because I also tried the last official release (2.30) and that is not supported there either.

[seandunderdale]

Ah, fair enough. Thanks for the response. I found a brute force workaround so it turned out ok in the end, but I guess its not a feature that anyone would need regularly.

[yolov]

You could share your workaround for this in case some one is using an official stable build and runs into this

[seandunderdale]

It was pretty brute force. I basically made a copy of the light in every frame, so it didnt have the light angle keyframed, but had the correct value for that frame, and keyframed the visibility of the lights to each oly be on for 1 frame. So its kind an an an animated sweep of lights. Rather crude method, but it worked.

[yolov]

Well, ok then Sounds a bit time-consuming, but effective.

[seandunderdale]

the shot is just a 70frame time lapse, of a car 360, and I only really needed about the last 7 frames of the shot to have the light angle animated so it didnt take long. But yeh, it wouldnt be great doing a longer shot this way.