Meshlight - render shader when light is off

[TheScope]

Hi,
topic says it pretty much all.
Right now, meshlight geometry is not rendered when the light is off. It would be great if instead the shader assigned to the mesh could be rendered.

Cheers, Florian

[yolov]

You could achieve more or less the same result with the VRay Light Mtl, instead of using meshLights. When the "direct illum" is enabled for the LightMtl it behaves as a meshLight. To "disable" the "light" but still keep a shader, you can disable "direct Illum" and add a material override and plug a material in the "V-Ray Material" slot. When direct illum is enabled, this override material will be ignored. When direct illum is disabled, this material override will be rendered instead. I don't know if there's other implications related to your workflow, but it might be worth testing.
Is this something that you can use in your workflow?

[TheScope]

Hey Alex,
VRay_Light_Mtl does work and I am using it at the moment with a VRay_Blend_Mtl to switch between light and regular shader.
But there is no way to add VRay_Light_Mtl to a Light Select render element (is there?) and it is also not recognized as a light by tools like the V-Ray Light Lister.

Cheers, Florian

[yolov]

Yes, that would be a drawback - it won't work with the lister and it won't contribute to light selects. I thought it might end up this way I'll log a feature request for the meshLight to render the shader when disabled.

[TheScope]

Thanks.

Florian