Light controls, dome and image plane alphas...

[evanerichards]

I have a couple requests.

In Arnold there is a control for shadows. It is basically a slider that allows you to turn down the intensity of the shadows. If you like your shadows but only want them at 50% strength, you can turn down the adjustment knob to do just that. It would be great to have something implemented in vray for that purpose.

Also in Arnold you can turn on an indicator that will tell you where the light has completely fallen off. You can adjust that to make your light completely dark at a certain point, but then if you go in an adjust the intensity of the light it doesn't move your falloff point. I realize this messes with the physically accurate falloff of the inverse square law and such, but it would be nice to have the option.

The other two requests, I've mentioned before but I'll mention again. It would be great to get rid of the alphas from the camera image plane, and from vray dome lights. It's possible those are there for a reason, but I can't think of a reason why you would want a completely white alpha. That's just the same as no alpha. It would be useful to do a render with an image plane in the background but still get and alpha from your objects. It would be nice to be able to do the same with your dome light. I realize you can turn it invisible, but I feel like there isn't any reason to have an alpha on the dome light to begin with. Even just a switch on both of these to turn off the alphas.

One last small thing, it would be nice to have the "interleave color channels" option when rendering TIFs toggled ON by default. I'm not aware of interleaved images not working in other softwares but I do know that non-interleaved TIFs don't work in any of Autodesks Premium VFX softwares (Flame, Smoke, Flare, Lustre) so it's a little thing but I feel like it might save other people some hassles in the future.


Thanks for all the great work you guys do.
I use vray every single day and it a genuine pleasure to work with.

[pechart]

Nice ideas.

In Arnold there is a control for shadows. It is basically a slider that allows you to turn down the intensity of the shadows. If you like your shadows but only want them at 50% strength, you can turn down the adjustment knob to do just that. It would be great to have something implemented in vray for that purpose.

Is this per object? Or per material? Or per light?

I know it's not the same and a workaround and a slider would be handy, but for now one can just pipe another material with some transparency into the shadow material override.

[evanerichards]

I believe it was on a per light basis. That seems like it would make the most sense.

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Lights in Maya have shadow color. How this Arnold control is better?

About the custom light fall-off, this is actually possible for the non-physical Maya lights in V-Ray.

from vray.utils import *
light=findByName("pointLightShape1")[0]
light.set("decay", 1.5)

You can set anything to "decay". The physical lights can't work with arbitrary decay.

[jbvfx]

@ivaylo:
What about getting an alpha toggle for imageplanes and lightDomes? That would be really helpfull.

[vlado]

In Arnold there is a control for shadows. It is basically a slider that allows you to turn down the intensity of the shadows. If you like your shadows but only want them at 50% strength, you can turn down the adjustment knob to do just that. It would be great to have something implemented in vray for that purpose.

You can change the shadow color to something other than black, though it is not quite the same thing as V-Ray will enforce the given shadow color regardless of the actual light intensity rather than make it a percentage of the light. It is not a particular problem to add a shadow density parameter to do just that and I'll make a note for it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[vlado]

Also, a minor thing, but simply state what you want and why you need it. There's no need to mention other renderers. Will make communication a bit friendlier.

Best regards,
Vlado

[evanerichards]

Ok. I won't mention other renderers. I wasn't trying to be unfriendly.

[vlado]

@ivaylo:
What about getting an alpha toggle for imageplanes and lightDomes? That would be really helpfull.

We do have the option for dome lights in 3ds Max; it would make sense to add it to Maya too and I'll make a note for it. I thought the image planes already had alpha control?

Best regards,
Vlado