View Dependence

[kmwhitt]

I am considering purchasing VRay and had a question. Once VRay has calculated global illumination for an interior scene, does it have to re-calculate the solution for each different camera view or is this processed once for the entire scene? In other words, is the radiosity calculation view dependent as many Monte Carlo type renderers are? Or can the calculation be solved and saved and be applied to other views with accuracy?

Thanks,

Kevin

[percydaman]

youll have to rerender the scene. There are some intelligent designs to minimize it, but its not radiosity...

[Dynedain]

It depends a lot on which GI method you use, and how divergent your cameras are.

If you use only photon mapping - no problem at all.

If you use irradience mapping - everything visible to the camera will be rendered, if you render from a different angle, you will need to do an incremental add in order to add in what is visible from the new angle that wasn't before (this is the same for zooming in as well).

If you use light cacheing - you have to recalc the lighting at every view since it is view (and resolution) specific.

[kmwhitt]

Thanks for the replies... I had no idea VRay had so many options.

Kevin

[Dynedain]

Not are there so many options, but you can use a combination of them.

You can pick both your first bounce, and secondary bounces - so you can use a combination of any 2 GI-calculation methods for your rendering.

[kmwhitt]

Documentation

Is there documentation that I can download about VRay. I would really enjoy reading more.

Thanks again,

Kevin

[Dynedain]

If you sign up for the demo - you should have access to the help files which are fairly extensive (but not entirely complete) for the new version.

A lot of info can also be found at http://www.vray.info