Rectangle Light Texture Alpha Not Working

[thebeals]

I am using Vray 3.4 in Maya 2016. I don't know if I am doing something wrong, but I cannot get the attrbibute texture on the rectangle light to do anything. See attached image. That should be a circular light and in the screen grab I have the alpha at 0 so nothing should be visible, but I have also created a black and white circular texture and applied it and still no results. I've also turned on and off "alpha is luminance" in the texture node.


Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?


Thank you!

[Komposer]

the RectTex A means only, that all pure black pixels in your texture will become transparent.
Nothing to to with the alpha channel.
So when you wish that all become transparent what is not white in your screenshot, make it black and let RTA at 0 - will work perfect!
How to manage light tex with seperate mask - no idea!
btw. Vlado said a few month before, that we nearly never need to increase the tex resolution, in most cases it´s perfect at 512.
Should have to do with hemisphere sampling or so...didn´t understand it and found no tuts for that theme!!! But has nothing to do with resulting rendered quality or resolution of your tex!

[thebeals]

Thank you so much for your reply! That is really helpful, I completely misunderstood the documentation. Thank you for the clarification.

I have to admit that I don't know much about the resolution, I always assumed it was referring to the texture size of the light, so I've just matched what my texture input is, but looks like that might be wrong thinking too. I'll track down Vlado's post. Thank you so much, you have been very helpful!