Urgent question about omni's in a restaurant

[indielyness]

hey guys,

I'm a relatively experienced vray user, but I am trying to render an interior of a restaurant and having to use a lot of different lights. I have exposed lightbulbs and i'm using emmissive light in the coil inside the bulb to give it a nice glowing effect. This works fine for 30 bulbs.

I then tried adding an omni light to each of these bulbs so that the bulbs are actually producing light, but after 3 hours, vray is still in the calculating phase... So something is badly wrong. I did increase the subdivisions to 20 and I have multiple reflective materials (most are actually) I'm guessing it's that? Is there any way to fix it?

I'm wondering, what are your workflows when having loads of artificial lights in a scene? My scene also has a glass entrance so natural light is coming in, but I want to simulate a real restaurant atmosphere (natural + loads of artificial light)?

Thanks in advance for any tips.

p.s I'm using vray 1.49.01 and sketchup 8.0.4811

[valerostudio]

Using an emmissive material on a coil is insanity in my opinion. It just seems like overkill for an interior rendering. Are the lights meant to be clear glass so you see the coil inside? If this is the case, I would just make a generic flat 2d piece in the shape of a coil to reduce the amount of geometry. If its not a clear bulb, I would just make an emmissive material on the bulb glass and use a bulb model with as few faces as possible to get the effect.

I would use omni lights along with rectagular lighting to get fill light and be aware, that the more lights in the model, the longer the rendering is going to take. For a production rendering, you are going to want to crank up the subdivisions on the lights also. I recently had some high detail interiors that used natural light along with omnis,IES, and rectangular lights and each view took 14 hours to cook.