Introduction to lighting in V-Ray

As we've already noted making use of 3ds Max's native tools, such as its lights, can be a perfectly viable approach to lighting and rendering with V-Ray. In fact, our ability to use 3ds Max's own light types may be an attractive option tous, especially if we already have some knowledge of and skill with the lighting tools in Max. And of course, even when we use native light types, 3ds Max native light types, we are still able to make good use of many V-Ray-specific lighting tools, such as the Global Illumination and Caustic Effects engines.

However, we just want to draw your attention to a couple of things to keep in mind if you want to take this particular approach to your lighting workflow. The first thing we want to just highlight is in connection with Shadow options you will need to set in your 3ds Max light types. So let's go into the Command panel, let's go over to the creation of our lights, and we just want to drop down. And I'm going to work with Standard lights in this instance. And I just want to create a simple target spot, so let's left-mouse click in the viewport, drag that out, and then right-click to end creation. This makes certain the light is selected, and then I'm going to come over into the Modify tab. And we just want to draw your attention to the Shadow settings.

Now if as we have done earlier on, you have set up your 3ds Max and V-Ray rendering using the default switcher, you will probably find that your Max native lights types will work with this VRayShadow option. They may set VRayShadowMaps, depending upon the parameters that you were wanting to work with, but you probably will find that one of these two options are set by default. If, however, you have come to setting up V-Ray in a manual fashion, then you may well find that one of these other Shadow map types or Shadow types are set by default. If that is the case, you're going to need to make certain that you just switch over to using as a VRayShadow option, which will give us Ray trace shadows, or VRayShadowMap.

Any of the other options set in here will either not work at all with V-Ray, or you'll get some very strange results, indeed, in your Render. So just make certain that when you're working with native Max lights that you set up your VRayShadow or VRayShadowMap options so that you have no problems with them in your scene. We also want to just highlight--if we come back to our Light section. There are a couple of light types we need to keep away from us, they clear up when rendering with V-Ray obviously anything that is a mental ray-specific light in terms of the mental ray area spot and Omni, and if we come over to our Photometric section we have the Mental Ray Sky Portal.

If we stay away from those we will be fine. Now the Mental Ray Sky Portal, its functionality is easily mimicked with the V-Ray light type itself. So the V-Ray light can act either as a GI portal, which the Mental Ray Sky Portal is designed as, or it can work as a standalone area light, which again this Mental Ray light type can do. We would also want to stay away from the 3ds Max Skylight in the Standard section, but we don't lose any functionality because there are a number of options that V-Ray offers to us for creating those same lighting effects. Now for the rest of the shadow, we are going to be working with the assumption that you are adopting our recommended V-Ray-centric workflow, and so we're going to focus solely on using V-Ray's own lighting toolset. This, of course, means introducing you to the key-- and yes the color was intended.

We're going to introduce you to the key tools available in V-Ray, and we're going to help you gain an understanding of how that controls are working as well. So let's move on then and start to take a look at one very specific V-Ray light type, and that is the aptly-named VRayLight.