This page describes the settings of the V-Ray Luminaire light.
Overview
The V-Ray Luminaire light object allows efficient rendering of entire light fixtures by loading their respective precomputed light fields from .vlw files. Such files are generated by Chaos and used in Chaos Cosmos light assets marked with a "luminaire" tag. The emitting surface of the luminaire is drawn in the viewport. This is either a box or a convex hull.
There is only initial support for V-Ray Luminaire in V-Ray GPU. Artifacts and errors may come up.
||V-Ray menu|| > Create > Lights > V-Ray Luminaire
||Create menu|| > Lights > V-Ray > V-Ray Luminaire > Click and drag in a viewport
||Command panel|| > Create tab > Lights > Choose V-Ray from dropdown > VRayLuminaire > Click and drag in a viewport
General
Enabled – Turns the VRayLuminaire light on and off.
Luminaire file – Specifies the .vlw file that holds the baked lighting.
Scale – Allows the loaded asset to be scaled up or down.
Intensity and color
Intensity – Specifies an intensity multiplier for the VRayLuminaireLight.
Color mode – Specifies the mode in which the color of the light field is adjusted:
Color – When selected, the Color swatch modifies the color of the light field.
Temperature – When selected, the Temperature value expressed in Kelvin modifies the color of the light field.
Color – Specifies color when the Color mode is set to Color.
Color temperature – Specifies color temperature in Kelvin when the Color mode is set to Temperature.
The Color and Temperature parameters of VRayLuminaire act as override to the source lights imported with the same Cosmos asset. However, with manually created VRayLuminaire lights and with Cosmos assets imported prior V-Ray 7 Update 2, the Color and Temperature parameters of VRayLuminaire act as tint multipliers to the color of the light field. Light fields generated for lights with non-pure white color naturally appear dimmer in the render when color with inverse hue is set with these parameters.
Options
Exclude – Opens the 3ds Max Exclude/Include window for selection of objects to be excluded or included in illumination and/or shadow-casting for this light.
+ – Adds objects to the Include/Exclude list by picking them in the viewport.
- – Removes objects from the Include/Exclude list by picking them in the viewport.
Affect diffuse – Determines whether the light is affecting the diffuse properties of the materials.
Affect specular – Determines whether the light is affecting the specular part of the materials.
Affect atmospherics – When enabled, the light influences the atmospheric effects in the scene.
Cast shadows – When enabled (the default), the light casts shadows. Turn this option off to disable shadow casting for the light.
Sampling
Filtering – Specifies the stochastic filtering of the light field to reduce aliasing.
Shadow bias – Moves the shadow toward or away from the shadow-casting object (or objects). If the Bias value is too low, shadows can "leak" through places they shouldn't, produce moire patterns, or make out-of-place dark areas on meshes. If Bias is too high, shadows can "detach" from an object. If the Bias value is too extreme in either direction, shadows might not be rendered at all.
Cutoff threshold – Specifies a threshold for the light intensity below which the light is not computed. This can be useful in scenes with many lights, where you want to limit the effect of the lights to some distance around them. Larger values cut away more from the light; lower values make the light range larger. If you specify 0.0, the light is calculated for all surfaces. This parameter is not available when the renderer is set to GPU.
Viewport
Viewport wire color – Changes the wireframe color of the light in the viewport. This is useful to visually recognize groups of lights from one another.
Icon text – Turns the viewport icon text on or off.
Example: VRayLuminaire
These examples demonstrate how using V-Ray Luminaire enhances render time and image quality.
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