So I am getting an error when using vray lights. is that not supported yet? will it be in the future.
krakatoa::vray::krakatoa_vry_light::get_ksr_light(): Light type is not supported by Krakatoa.
Btw this is a great feature you guys have decided to add to Kraktoa exciting stuff.
I get this error too. I’m hoping that this will be a feature, as most people using vray use their lights.
Right now only 3ds Max (Omni, Spot, Direct) lights are supported by Krakatoa.
Supporting most V-ray Camera modes and eventually most V-Ray Lights is on the ToDo list. However, some might be tricky to get into the Krakatoa rendering logic. We should at least make sure Krakatoa ignores light types it does not support.
The fact that you can get GI from the particles is great though.
Since you can’t use the lights from vray I guess the best way forward if you want to still use your vray lights would be to use a shadow reflection catcher and comp that over your main render.
We fixed internally the VRayLights causing the KVRY plugin to fail, we will post a new build later this week.
We also fixed the Light Decay to match (Krakatoa used to calculate it differently than Max/VRay), as well as an issue where rectangular Spots and Direct lights with non-1.0 aspect were scaling shadows incorrectly.
That being said, I tested a quick hack where a VRayLight (Planar with default settings) was replaced in the Krakatoa pass by an Omni light with default settings. I set the Omni to exclude all scene geometry, so it only lights the particles, while the geometry is all lit by the V-Ray area light.
Here are the screenshots:
I would say that having some, albeit wrong, lighting on the particles from the location of the VRayLight is better than having nothing.
In the future we might try to see if we can approximate area lights by rendering multiple Krakatoa lights set to a fractional Multiplier. (in Krakatoa 1.0, we had a test with 74 spots to approximate a skylight and it worked quite reasonably).
I think this is a reasonable approach, especially now that having vray lights doesn’t crash the render. Having to add a custom light for the particles is a much easier sell than ‘you can’t use vray lights in your scene.’
I agree that would be a good aproach.
