Shadow Maps for V-Ray Maya

[Fikret]

I worked on a night city scene with almost 1000 lights in 3DS MAX and V-Ray. The render times are quite amazing for the complexity of the scene. I used shadow maps for most of the lights and the quality is good enough in this case. Just for curiosity I exported the scene to maya and tried to render in a newer V-Ray version which is supposed to handle many lights much faster. But I was very surprised that the render time was longer, although I did use only a default material for the whole scene and no GI. I guess the reason for that is that V-Ray for Maya does not support shadow maps, but only raytraced shadows. Maybe it is also due to the fact that Maya does not support light instancing. When switching the shadows in 3DS Max to raytraced the render times also increased dramatically.
So, is there any possibility to speed up rendering with so many lights by getting shadow maps working for V-Ray for Maya?

[vlado]

We will not be adding shadow maps. However adaptive lights are on by default in 3ds Max and off by default in Maya, maybe that caused the difference?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Fikret]

We are using vray 2.5 for 3dsmax without the adaptive light function. In maya with vray 3.60.01 the light evaluation is set to adaptive by default.
I just set it to full evaluation and it renders much faster now. That's strange, it should render faster with adaptive on? I have about 600 lights in the scene, most of them regular spot or point lights, which I exported from 3dsmax via fbx. As I said, in 3dsmax the scene has even more lights and renders very fast with shadow maps and no adaptive light funcion at all.
Another issue which I have in maya is the missing display of vray lights in the viewport, is there any way to get them displayed? I'm using viewport 2.0.

best regards,
Fikret

[yolov]

It would be useful to us if you could share the scene so we can check why it's rendering slower with adaptive lights in Maya. We can't really tell without having a scene to investigate and off the top of my head I don't remember getting other reports that adaptive lights slows the render down, so this might be worth looking into.

As for the light representation in the viewport - it may depend on your maya version and maya video driver settings. I've explained it in a lot of detail here and I'll add this to the documentation: https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...wport-lighting

[Fikret]

Thanks for your reply Yolov, just sent you a simple test scene via private message.