In which engines can you get the same render time with both a light and light material? I work with 3 of them, and the material light/emission is always slower…
But i agree in the fact that it could get some improvements.
Would you please let me know the ticket number of the request you’ve sent to us? It us very unusual to not receive any reply from the Support Team.
The way that V-Ray Light and V-Ray Light Material works is completely different. The light allows much better optimization which allows us to calculate better quality for less render time, those optimizations cannot be applied to the Light material although like Moriah suggested this could be improved a bit.
Other render engines also behaves similarly unless they have option under the hood to convert standard primitives with light materials to lights, otherwise they should also have a difference in both rendertime and quality.
It’s not that the mesh light is slower, it’s that the sphere light is more optimized and is faster (because V-Ray knows that it’s a sphere specifically and has special code to handle that). With that said, some improvements to mesh lights (and VRayLightMtl with direct illumination enabled) are planned for the next SP.
Would you please clarify why this approach feels like wrong to you?
A plane light in front of the light geometry seems a very acceptable workflow, it should generate approximately the same illumination and it will eliminate the need to increase IS settings to get smooth result.
Did you compare the result between the geometry with LightMtl or Meshlight and the one with the Plane light?
Do they look similar as illumination not as render time and quality.