LED Lights

[james_morvay1]

I have an ongoing project where LED light usage is necessary. The LED lighting I need is a LED strip light, not a fixture, such as a bulb or a fixture with LED lights within. I can approximate the size of the LED light itself (roughly .125 x .125 inches) and create the strip with multiple LED lights on the strip, but the hard part is simulating the light emission from the LED itself. I cannot find any lighting data on a singular LED, so for now, I am constrained to using a rectangular light element from the Vray Lighting section and tweaking the settings to closely match its emission. I tried applying an emissive material to the LED model but I get no results (in the material settings there seems to be an entry missing that used to be around before, is this discontinued by Vray?) Anyways, I'd love to know if there is a better way of creating an LED light and to set it up to simulate the same lighting behavior as the real thing?

[Martinch]

You could try creating all those .125" x .125" square LEDs in your configuration, and group them into a component, then convert that component into a single mesh light. It won't give you pixel-level control, but you can put a bitmap or gradient in it. The accompanying screen shot shows three duplicate mesh lights with .125" LED "diodes". Different spacing out from the wall so you can see how distance affects it.
Good luck!

[james_morvay1]

You could try creating all those .125" x .125" square LEDs in your configuration, and group them into a component, then convert that component into a single mesh light. It won't give you pixel-level control, but you can put a bitmap or gradient in it. The accompanying screen shot shows three duplicate mesh lights with .125" LED "diodes". Different spacing out from the wall so you can see how distance affects it.
Good luck!

Thanks for the idea. I did try out rectangular lighting before, after finding mesh lights were really bogging down the render times. I failed to mention before that my LED lighting usage is pretty massive, with as many as 800 individual lights. Combining rectangular lights into the grouping I need them in, may save some resources and speed up render time and I like the idea of gradient usage (never used that before) but I will need to have the LED lights cast enough of a light beam to reflect off the back of a surface that's 12 inches away, so the light output would need to be sufficient.

I'll give your idea a try and see if it makes a difference, thanks!