About AreaLight

#1

In maya,when I use AreaLight(key light) ,I found that the render speed was so slow,and many many hot pixel，how can I slove it？ Please help me. Tanks~

#2

Yes, area lights (with raytraced soft shadows) are slow.

You can get rid of the noisy shadows (hot pixels) by using more samples on the raytraced shadow. Taking more samples will slow down your rendering more, though.

-jeremy

#3

Can’t you use the default shadow samples on your light, get clean and hard edged shadows and blur them later in compositing? You’d need to render separately a shadow pass, though…

#4

Thanks your reply~! And, what do you think of area light? What kind of light you use regularly？I think that area light is useful,the illumination is soft,but the noisy shadow is hard to slove,if I use more samples,the render speed is slowly.Is it only use more samples to slove this?

#5

Yes, if you want better quality you’ll have to sacrifice rendertime, like with most other things. Good things take time :slight_smile:

#6

For some reason I dont know, my post from the other day did not show up

Anyways, I was saying - Why dont you use raytraced shadows with default settings, that means with sharp edges and then try to blur them in comp? Hard edged raytraced shadows should be faster to render…

#7

It’s very difficult to get proper attenuation of the blur when doing it that way. It often just looks like a drop shadow. Also, you will risk blurring it out into regions where there should be no shadow at all. Post-processing to fix render problems will generally just end up causing you more problems, than biting the bullet and accepting longer render times.

#8

Also, smaller area lights will need fewer samples but produce sharper shadows

#9

I made these two videos specifically to address questions about improved render-time and quality:

http://www.mentalray.tv/71/3d-studio-max/monday-movie-30-faster-renders-part-1
http://www.mentalray.tv/72/3d-studio-max/monday-movie-31-faster-renders-part-2

#10

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