Mesh lights

[cobrien]

Hello,

Does anyone know if you can get rid of the little boxes that accompany v-ray mesh lights? Or at least have them centered to the mesh light?

I'm forever grabbing them when selecting other things & accidently moving lights around. You also zoom to them rather than the light when you  zoom to selected object.

[Justin Montoya]

Under the lights palette, you should be able to turn them 'Not Visible' like any other light by clicking the 'Eye' column next to the Mesh lights.  You could also just make them 'Ghosted'  if that's your shtick. 

[cobrien]

Hi Justin, I do sometimes hide them but I like to keep them visible so they move with the objects they are associated with.

I've just been working on a model that has a counter with a led strip light around the base (mesh light). I like to keep the light visible so when I move the counter it goes with it. For some reason when I created the mesh light it put the little box with x in it 9m in front of the light & 3m higher. If you select the mesh light & zoom to selection it zoom's to the little box rather than the light.

[Andrew West]

I have the same problem and I have asked Tech to address this in the future.  I often create a mesh light for my interiors and assign an hdri image to it for ambiance and adjust the settings.   I then select that light so that I can copy it to a new room, go  to top view to move it and the screen centers on that annoying little box.  Then I have to scroll around to the actual model and move/ scale my light  to the new location.  It is just really inefficient on large projects with multiple mesh lights that get adjusted regularly.    

[Justin Montoya]

cobrien-

I think you should try using emitter material lights for this sort of LED lighting detail.  I also use a lot of LED strip lighting on counters and displays, and after many tests and projects, I've found the emitter material lights to be far more efficient to use for this purpose.  You can then much more easily adjust the various material lights for the many objects/faces without using the chunky light palette editor.  Hopefully our OpenGL based Shaded renderer will support this in the future as well because it is already possible with the OpenGL API, but not implemented because silly RenderZone doesn't support it.

Here's some examples of using only Emitter material lights for detail lighting:

 

[Andrew West]

Justin

I also use emitter lights for certain applications but I find that mesh lights are where I start in order to add general interior lighting to set the mood for the scene.  In Maxwell I used to do the same. Then I start to add the specific lights that would be visible on the geometry, like IES  or undercounter strip lights.  It is just how I approach photography and lighting design.  The one drawback to just using emitters for lighting is the lack of HDRI textures attached to my meshes that add a lot of ambience.  Everyone has their technique and there is no correct way to achieve what you are after.   

[Justin Montoya]

Andrew, I agree.  Mesh lights have their place and your recommendation for adding ambience with HDRI attached makes mesh lights a very nice feature.

But for LED lighting details like under cabinet lighting, logo or art backlighting, etc, then emitter materials work better than mesh lights in my experience, and are a lot easier to use and edit in this purpose.

For live event environments, they typically want dramatic lighting with dark overall backgrounds and lots of highlights to add interest.  I can get away with a simple studio dome light and a handful of sphere lights to provide all the illumination needed because there are so many other glowing light elements in the scene.

I love hearing everyones approach to these situations and it's great we have that flexibility.  

[cobrien]

Thanks Justin, I haven't had much of a play with emitter lights yet but I will.

Other than the little box I've been enjoying mesh lights, it's one of the few things that doesn't take me longer to do than v6!