VRayAmbientLight in Maya

[sebbiej]

Hi all,

I'm trying to use the VRayAmbientLight in Maya from the "Create a V-Ray node from File" menu. This is just due to us needing to render out an animation with moving objects and camera, and we're pretty short on time and haven't got a massive render farm, plus I don't want to have to deal with headaches of flickering in the GI, etc. Despite my scene looking sweet with GI on . Also the standard Maya ambient light is causing issues with different intensities of light between the render slaves, no idea why. Anyway...

If I use the LightAmbient plug in, it doesn't light up anything, is this a bug? It doesn't seem to have the controls that the Max version does, is it finished?

So I tried out the LightAmbientMax instead, which seems to work. So I've got a VrayDirt node plugged in to that, voila I have a lit scene. Is there anyway to have this ambient light directed to a Vray Render Element (e.g. a light select?).
I could really do with the ability of controlling this in post.

Thanks,

[Morbid Angel]

hmm maya's ambient light works fine. You can plugin dirt into its color and it should do the same thing. The issue I think if I remember correctly it has to be at the grid 0, 0, 0...or else it shades weirdly.

[vlado]

You can use the Maya ambient light (it's the same thing under the hood), just make sure to set the "Ambient shade" to 0.0

Best regards,
Vlado

[sebbiej]

Thanks both. Yeahm in the past I have used the standard Maya Ambient Light and it's worked fine, but it seems to be buggy with my render slaves (see below). But, the "LightAmbientMax" node seems to be able to light the scene correctly though with ambient light, which is odd!

However I might end up trying to render it with GI now, it's 20 minutes for a 720p frame without GI and with the ambient light, or 14 minutes with GI (Iradiance Map/Light Cache), or 9 minutes when using a pre-calculated map.

[yolov]

Was the above image rendered with DR?

[sebbiej]

Yes, indeed it was. That's a snap shot from the Light Select element, with just the ambient light assigned to it.

It's a weird one as it renders out fine when using GI.

So is the VRayAmbientLight not really to be used in Maya then?

[yolov]

On the contrary, but that doesn't mean that there cannot be bugs with it, which is why what we're interested in finding out
Could you share that scene with its current setup? Since this looks like a DR issue.
And could you share some information on your software setup: Maya version, vray version. Are the render slaves using the same vray version as the client machine? What OS is used on all machines that are involved in the rendering?

[sebbiej]

Sorry I can't share the scene, it's work for a client which we can't disclose.

But it was made in Maya 2017, Vray 3.40.06, all slaves are running the same versions of Vray, Maya 2017 is installed on all slaves, and we're running Windows 7.

[vlado]

We'll try to reproduce it here with a test scene.

Best regards,
Vlado

[yolov]

We've had no luck reproducing this here so far. But there's a few more things we could try with your help:
* can you select the ambient light and go to file > export selection and save it as .ma file and send it over ? That way we won't get any sensitive scene data, but we'll be able to look at the ambient light and its settings.
* if you render only using the ambient light - does it work?
* can you also try if the same thing happens with 3.40.04 ?