CGTalk - Mental Ray - area light sampling

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pixelshaker

07-17-2006, 10:41 AM

Hello all,

i am struggling around with the sampling of mental ray area lights in maya for optimazation reasons. The common opinions are that sampling accords to how much lightsources are placed in the uv space of the lightshape. So a sampling of 1 1 would mean a pointlight, 4 4 would give me 16 lights.

Is this right ? This would mean more sampling would make the shadows softer, less sampling would show up shadowedges but the setting shouldn´t define the quality of the shadows. A 1 1 sampling should make a point light hard shadow but it doesn´t, the shadow gets crispy. Higher sampling makes it cleaner. So in my opinion it can´t be a uv placement only.

So what does the sampling define ?

Best regards,
Andy

Lamster

07-17-2006, 12:31 PM

I think you can take a look at the Mental Ray Reference in the Maya Help files for the actual definition of the samples in the mental ray area lights setting. As far as I know, The lower the number for your samples, the more grainy your soft shadows will look and vice versa. Normally, for a 768x576 PAL render, I'd say that somewhere around 5 5 or 6 6 will be sufficient, especially for animation. I've not pushed it past 8 before. As you know, the higher the number, the more time it takes to render.

A value of 1 1 does not mean your shadows will be hard. They just mean your soft shadows will be very grainy or low quality.

Terence

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