1234 State Parkway

[glorybound]

Some color corrections. Hopefully, I went in the right direction.

[AJ Jefferies]

Looking good! I'm not a huge fan of where the vignetting turns the whites of the chandelier grey/dim. Also the gap under the door in the hallway looks a bit large.

[Karol.Osinski]

But in interiors you can get same result with irmap if you know what you are doing at 10th of the render time.

Hey Morbid Angel

First of all thanks for your posts in this thread. Could you please elaborate a bit more on good IM results? After having problems with IM when using distributed rendering in our studio I switched to BF + LC which gives nicer results but I kind of miss fast and noise free IM solution. Is there anything in particular I should look at to get my results closer to BF? For example turn and adjust its AO pass? I would also love to achieve more prominent light from HDRI or sun like BF does.

regards,
Karol

[Morbid Angel]

Hi Karol,
There should not be problems with irmap when using DR, in fact I use it often. You'd have to show me what you are experiencing?

[Karol.Osinski]

My problem was, I often lost buckets due to "IM map could not be loaded" or something like this. So some buckets rendered much darker. I did some research before and someone suggested to save and load IM map manually on each of machines which is rather too much effort considering tje studio environment. Also stability of our server might be an issue + that we are rendering with 2 iMacPro's + 2 Windows machines - all based on Linux server. Anyway I talked about it directly with Chaos Group devs and they simply recommended me to switch to BF which I did and it indeed solved my problem. Although,I still would be happy out be able to achieve close to BF results with IM without any issues.

[Morbid Angel]

Curious how you are able to render in linux environment with 3ds max? I would suggest to isolate the issue. If its a mac machine that's making things bad probably isolate it and see if win only pc workstations work as in theory they should.

[Morbid Angel]

In order to get DR working correctly you need same version of 3ds max/vray running on all machines. All machines have correct access to network etc. In often cases even if machine has everything running, some times its a good idea to open 3ds max on it and load the scene and try to render. You be surprised the errors you might encounter which in turn will help you track and fix the issues.

[Karol.Osinski]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that we are using Maya (I know..wrong section, bad that wasn't my intention), anyway the concept is the same. I guess I have to dig into admin settings and make sure all machines have clear access to the server in order to load IM / HDRI etc. Although my initial question was to how to achieve very similar results to BF using IM? Would you please elaborate on what I have mentioned about using AO pass and how to achieve more prominent lighting with IM (BF seems to have much nicer sunny areas for example). If you are busy - please don't bother - I am going to go back to my Ultimate Mograph course about V-Ray to refresh my knowledge Thanks anyway!

[Morbid Angel]

Ambient occlusion in any circumstance is a wrong way of going about things. Its fake and will never compare to bruteforce. Some times it works for clients who just want to see stronger detail and contrast but its not physically correct. The thing with irradiance map is that its brute force interpolated. The higher the interpolation the smoother the result is, but it also becomes biased and therefore incorrect. The more bruteforce samples you give to irradiance map, the longer it takes to calculate it and, it defeats the purpose. If you are trying to get iramp to match bf you will get render time that of bf. There really isn't a magical solution to getting a crisp result with irmap and having a fast render time if you understand what I'm saying.

[Karol.Osinski]

Well, thanks for taking me down to the ground I fooled myself for a moment with those "amazing" IM results, but you are right...The way I see it now (the usage of IM), maybe I could get away with it with the slow to render scenes but without many small details where BF shines. For the the rest I think I stick with BF as for our interiors where we use a lot of custom stone screens etc. - BG gives me much much nicer results and small shadows are nicely defined. Thanks so much for you time Morbid Angel and have a great day