Speed of Light: Photometric Point Lights, one vs many?

Scavenger

I'm working on converting a model for iray. A long hallway...

The original was designed to be lit by long ceiling panels set as emmissives. I've decided I wish to have a photometric version, as all the emmisives from the ceiling are a bit slow. (I haven't checked to see how the polygons in the ceiling pannels  are...if there's many or a few...but I'm going to assume many for the purpose of this question.).

I HAVE been playing with shaping photometric point lights into columns/rods for use in place of emissive lights...basically like flourescent tubes..they're working pretty well so far.

THE QUESTION I'm heading to, though, is it better/quicker, to have for just the single point light streached the full length of the hall way. ie:

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OR instead use several smaller length lights instead?

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fastbike1

How are you changing geometry on point lights? I don't believe you can actually change geometry. Here are 3 examples. First one Iray pt light 10x10 default lumens. Second one 1 x 100 default lumens. Third one 1 x 1000.  Cubes are 1 m. No difference

Scavenger

I'm stretching them with scale. It works.  I'm doing some render tests right now, so i can post pics and stuff.  Make sure you change the geometry of the point light into something else..like a column or plane.

Scavenger

Hmm.. Did 3 tests, not of the broken vs single lights, but to see speed differences between the mesh lights and the point lights (and a 3x size of the point light that I'd shrink in post).

With this test, the mesh lights, not the photometric is about 10% quicker.

(I have no idea if this test is meaningful...if the progression is linear, if it changes over a greater amount of time...)

 

EDIT: Did a series of tests with Mesh lights at 3x the size, to see if i could track how these progress.

Scavenger

Well.. finding all sorts of data that I don't know what all it means, but to answer my original question,  I did a 3x size render with the photometric light, then split it into 3, and did it again..the single light had slightly more iterations  and convergence in a full 2 hour run.