V-Ray lights are explicitly designed to work with V-Ray and optimize its features. V-Ray also provides shadow options for standard Maya lights and utilities to assist in the lighting process.
Overview
While you can use Maya standard lights with V-Ray, V-Ray includes a set of lights designed specifically for rendering with the V-Ray engine. As with standard Maya, they are created using the Lights tab in the Create menu. Alternatively, they can be created using the V-Ray Shelf.
- Area lights shine from a light source contained within a specified area or boundary. There are several types of Area lights.
- Sunlight simulates the sun, creating a single bright light for daytime exterior and interior scenes.
- Photometric lights use IES files to determine the shape of the light cone and light falloff.
- Mesh lights turn polygon objects into lights that emit both direct and indirect illumination.
V-Ray also provides Light Attributes for standard Maya lights. These lights work similarly to their standard Maya counterparts but are optimized to work with V-Ray.
The V-Ray Light Meter utility helps evaluate the lighting in a scene so adjustments can be made to improve exposure.
Image courtesy of Mehmet Fatih Usta
Types of Lights
- VRayLightRect, also known as the V-Ray Rectangle light or an Area light, is a planar light source shaped like a rectangle or circular disk. Rectangle lights, such as lamps, are useful for simulating artificial light sources in an interior environment. A rectangle light can have any one of two different shapes: plane or disc. For more information, see VRayLightRect.
- VRayLightSphere is a VRay Light object in the shape of a sphere, casting light outward in all directions. For more information, see VRayLightSphere.
- Photometric lights are designed to simulate a light source's distribution pattern precisely as they behave in real life by loading and using an IES (Illumination Engineering Society) file. An IES profile contains details about the light's behavior, such as how it passes through fresnel lenses, intensity, and falloff. For more information, see VRayIES.
- VRayLightDome (also considered an area light) creates light within a dome or spherical shape to create a traditional global illumination setup. This Light is frequently used to load HDRI environment images. For more information, see VRayLightDome.
Sunlight is a spherical light source placed at a specific location that simulates the sun in the sky. Sunlight has some unique qualities. Check the VRaySun page for more information.
- VRayLightMesh can create light sources with volume and shape defined by geometry in the scene without using self-illuminated objects and global illumination. For more information, see VRayLightMesh.
- VRayLightLuminaire efficiently renders entire light fixtures by precomputing the light field of the source on a bounding box surrounding the light. This feature is available for Cosmos light assets tagged with the "Luminaire" label. For more information, see VRayLightLuminaire.
Utilities