RE: X-DOF incremental IMap but only for one frame...

[sany]

Hi all,

Just starting to try to calculate very rough render times for a large High Res animation project coming up. This project will use X-DOF and Vray. As there will be a lot of character and other animation it is not possible to save the IR map for fast renders over BB however as I'm using X-DOF for both Motion Blur and DOF I wondered if anyone has any useful tips, tricks and solutions for saving the IR map but ONLY through all X-DOF passes for the ONE FRAME. ie once BB has rendered that entire frame with all X-DOF passes the Incremental IR Map is then deleted ready for recalculation on the next frame.

I have done some tests already but have not managed to find a solution and my animation outputs with artifacts flashing everywhere due to BB using the same scene file rather than reopening max and therefore clearing the cached IR map. I might be wrong but I don't believe that saving the IR map for just the passes of a single frame would cause any noticeable unwanted effects. I have tried to look for similar posts but with no success and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Maybe a simple solution would be to create a script but as I have never created a max script before it seems slightly daunting so again if someone can think of a freely available script which could be easily modified by a complete novice like myself then please point me in the right direction.

Sany

[sany]

Someone help please or at least let me know if I didnt make sense?

[RErender]

It kind of makes sense, I haven't ever used x-dof so I do not understand what passes it does. You could use my script http://www.chaoticdimension.com/foru...t=imap+control to reload a base imap every frame and then add incrementaly for the passes, not sure if it would work, maybe give some more details of your scene, x-dof ....

[sany]

Thanks for your Reply Eric!

I downloaded your Script which is excellent, However either it won't be able to solve my problems or I can't get my head round it.

Just to make it clearer I'll go through my scene set up:

Basicly it's an animation for which I can't precalculate the GI every nth frame which is fine and doesn't pose too many problems if I have my settings high. Where my dilema lies is that I am using X-DOF to generate the DOF and Motion Blur as it is extremely quick. However I would like to speed up the process even more. X-dof basicly works much like the standard Max Camera multi-Pass Effect in that it will render a chosen number of passes then blend these together to achieve the final effects for that perticular Frame. My problem is that I would like a function within V-ray or as a stand allone script which resets the cached incrimental map after a certain number of renders this is because X-DOF sees each pass as seperate render and will want to calculate the IR map for each pass. By asking VRay to reset the cached map after a certain number of frames allows me to set this number to however many passes X-DOF is set to and would mean that once all passes and the final Frame is generated the cached IR map is then reset for my next frame. This would save a huge amount of render time as it would take roughly only one 10th of the time to render a frame if I have the amount of X-DOF passes set to 10.

My furstration is that I know nothing about maxscript and although I might be wrong I get the feeling that it would be fairly easy to add this function with it.

Thanks again

Sany

[sany]

Just recieved the Vray Build 1.46.12 feature list and under extended features there is the following:


* Added a parameter Number of passes for the light cache; this allows
to achieve the same light cache on single- and multi-processor machines
while keeping the advantage of multithreading.

Am I right in thinking that this is what I've been waiting for???


if so how comes there is nothing to download from the latest build area?

[sany]

Also just need someone to confirm: Is Build 1.46.12 a beta or not?

[percydaman]

it is definitely a beta. Not sure if its there now, they might have removed it due to some pressing bugs. There will be a new version very soon.

[sany]

Thanks Percy. Shame thought I had my solution there.