Lighting scale

[treyharrell]

Hi guys, a quick (hopefully) request:

It would be fantastic to be able to specify scale in the render globals (for the purposes of lighting falloff, occlusion radius, physical camera, etc) instead of having to rely on (and set) Maya preferences for scale facility-wide.

Because different projects in production at the same time might be working at different scales due to unwieldiness, rounding errors, etc, it's really dicey to change every single user's Maya preferences to accomplish the scale trick... it introduces an awful lot of possibilities for the same scene to render differently between different users.

Thanks!

--T

[treyharrell]

To clarify, just giving the user the ability to override the Maya prefs and set a custom meters_scale in SettingsUnitsInfo is what we're looking for (maybe stick it next to the photometric stuff under Misc?). The attr exists in .vrscenes at present, so I'm hoping it wouldn't be a too big of a deal to implement.

--T

[vlado]

Hm, ok, will see what can be done about it. There is also the photometric light scale parameter in the Misc section of the V-Ray settings; it can be used to scale the lighting whenever it is specified in physical units.

Best regards,
Vlado

[treyharrell]

Hi Vlado,

True enough for some situations, but the photometric scale doesn't help with the physical camera scaling issues or occlusion scale, unfortunately, without manual intervention.

Here's a scenario: individual assets are look developed at 1:1 scale in Maya, with physical camera settings and occlusion scales. We get a look that we like, and a balanced lighting setup that we like... falloff, spec, etc.

The asset is then plopped into a 1:100 scale scene due to (for instance) miles and miles of cityscape and fear of rounding errors. Getting the exposure and lighting (basically the entire look) to behave the same under that situation is really difficult at present... particularly with regard to the physical camera and dirt map radius. Having to switch dome lights to temperature mode isn't really ideal either.

Having a float field meters_scale in globals where we could just specify the multiplier would be the most elegant solution to this issue (for us at least!)

Thanks for checking into it,

--T