Mesh Light jagged

[damaggio]

Is there a setting to get rid of the jagged Mesh light when is rendered?...see image...its a simple poly shape with Mesh light on it.

[joconnell]

It's the correct result for it, the problem is the renderer has to go from a really bright pixel value of the light to the black beside it. The anti aliased edge you'd normally see is a blend of the black value and the bright light, the problem is that the light is still really bright after being blended with the black behind it so you still end up with a pixel which is brighter than normal white. It's a common problem and you can either clamp your render in the colour mapping section (has issues if you want to break apart and recombine your render later), put a glow / flare on the light in post (what normally happens in real life) or what a lot of people do is make the light invisible to the camera and place a plane object in the same position with a texture of a light mapped to it - you get a stand in object that you can treat differently to the light actual hitting your scene.

[damaggio]

Okay joconnell, i just tried that using a stand in copy with texture, more work but seems to be the way to go, or the clamp, I'll test that too...thanks for the quick answer.

[joconnell]

Yep - all that's happening is that the anti aliaser is battling with how bright your light multiplier is. Black is 0 in vray, white is 1.0 so a blending pixel between the two is half way between 0 and 1 or 0.5 - the issue you're getting is that if your vraylight has a multiplier of 10 for example, halfway between 0 and 10 is 5, and 5 is still way brighter than your normal white pixel of 1.0 - it's just an exposure / brightness thing!

[damaggio]

Thanks again, I did more tests and the only way , as you suggested, was to lower the multiplier to 1 but not higher because starts introducing aliasing , unfortunately a value of 1 is too low for a real scale scene as per my image.(also tried lighter environment backgrounds but the problem is the same)
I think I'll stick to the stand in plane option joconnell, It seems like a better solution.
Thanks.

[Svetlozar Draganov]

There are number of ways to workaround/resolve the issue.

1.You may hide the light for the camera and put a self illuminated object with lower intensity instead of it. With this setup V-Ray will be able to sample the self illuminated object while the original light will illuminate the scene with the desired brightness.

2.You may activate the Clamping option under the Color Mapping tab, this option will ease the Image Sampler job and is should be able to smooth the result without changing the overall illumination.

3.You may add Lens Effects with subtle Bloom effect just enough to cover the jagged pixels.

[damaggio]

Thanks Svetlozar, I'm doing just that and is working well, thank you for your notes.The bloom effect is great too.