Well its either me not knowing how to use it or its bugged. Basically I had to start using standard lights in order to gain control over spotlight parameters (hotspots/fallofs etc etc which unfortunateally vray lights does not support). When I started to light my models all was fina. I’ve done it from RT engine. But when I render the image its completly different. (take a look below). I’ve try to fix it, change shadow types, lights etc etc but they always produce that same effect.
When I had it in RT I simply turn ON Area Shadow Under vrayshadow params and it become smooth again. I guess its bugged in vray.
You can do this with Vray IES lights and with the amount of IES files out there, you can get shapes/falloffs that you just can’t get with standard spotlights. [There are thousands & thousands of free IES lights on the net.]
And yes you CAN get nice area shadows with them as well [you may need to adjust the SIZE parameter in the IES file though, which is as easy as opening up the IES in a text file and changing a couple of numbers]
Vlado I dont see any shadow biass there, even if I try to adjust the Standard Vrayshadow parameters, and it still didnt work.
3DMK - Hey, thanx for the idea! However it wont work, simply because I cant control the diffuse/specular/reflection in it (disable enable etc). Even tho it still has that same bug as Standard light auc !
I just did some tests on a simple scene with a plane a sphere & a Vray IES light [only using your IES file as I couldn’t open your max scene].
NOTE* most IES files can’t create area shadows due to some negative numbers in the scale parameter.
There certainly is a cutoff problem with the IES lights as you mentioned, [but it seems to be linked to the 3ds max photometric scale]
I was able to fix the cutoff by turning OFF USE 3ds MAX PHOTOMETRIC scale in the global switches
It does seem to dim the light considerably though & renders a bit slower so you will have to turn up the multiplier, but at least it works that way.
auc !