is there a recommended way to do the above? it would be very nice to model a headlight with the reflective and refractive elements, stick a light in, do some kind of spherical render in an empty scene with nice caustics enabled, then save it to an ies file (or some other file type i guess.. ) to speed up subsequent rendering.
i imagine it might be possible to render out a spherical bitmap from the position of the light source, and use that in the light texture slot..?
I did something like this a few years ago. A real BiXenon headlight from a CAD derived file was used to drive a true caustic simulation. The actual filament in the HID bulb was used as a source for a VrayMeshLight creating the caustics. The output was then baked onto a sphere, which is now used in conjunction with an omnilight to get quick results.
The photon map was massive, around 28gb in size and took a few nights to compute.
excellent.. thats basically what i was thinking of trying..
