DMC vs. rQMC

[^Lele^]

WOAH I think I'm in over my head here.

Okay. I loaded up ur script with a basic scene. teapot & plane ( with blurry reflections) & Hdri dome light. If I understand correctly the script tells how good ur AA settings are working and changes ur AA thres to average out the subdivs used within the settings that you've chosen??

First of all, sorry for taking ages to reply. The forum is still sending me a mail in ten, it seems, and i miss stuff along the way. this post was one.

Let's see if I can clear this up.
It's no chance at all that the tool is inside the the Exposimeter: the job it does is IDENTICAL to exposing.
Only, it's performed on the sampling pass ("show samples" in the AA settings, or the proper render pass, as you wish).
And yes, you're entirely correct: it does ATTEMPT (in that it needs a few iterations to nail it) to match the average brightness of the sampling picture to what you have set in the BIAS.
Whatever is in the scene, and whatever the average brightness, each average represents exactly a certain number of rays traced.
Take two very different shots, with identical min and max AA subdivs, match their sampling to the same average (or BIAS), they both will have traced the same amount of AA rays, invariably.

lets just say I this was going to be an animation. and I wanted to work with unclamped 32bit RPF's. ( do you work in 32bit unclampled or something else? )

Always full float, yes.

Aside from rerendering over and over again until you reach the quality you want ( lets assume TV/cinematic production quality ) Is there good rule of thumb I can start at? or some other trick to finding good min max AA settings?

Well, it's entirely down to the scene and exposure, unfortunately.
Brighter pixels are harder to AA than darker ones; finely detailed textures are more difficult than large, even areas and so on.

I read a PDF my user Brian541( sp? ) and he recommended never going over 6max 4min subdiv, but I've also read this doesn't apply to animation.

Needless to say I'm a little confused.

I bet you are: I disagree entirely with the above sentence.
First because "never" is a word I loathe and avoid using.
Second, because doing so (min 4 - max 6) means the AAser will oversample even areas which needn't oversample (thanks to the forced min value), while it will not be able to clean areas which will need it badly (set a material with a bright glossy reflection of 0.1, and try and clean that with the default subdivs in the material and 6 max subdivs in the AA).
On top of that, all the hard work Vlado put into making the sampler adaptive is thrown out of the window, along with his "universal settings" method, the single biggest eye-opener for me on how VRay works.


I hope I haven't confused you further.
If that's the case, feel free to ask for more confused answers

[R_Cyph]

No you've definately cleared a few things up! But I have more questions.

lets say I set min1 and max 10 for AA ,use the script and find thats it using the max value a large percentage of the time. how do i know how much I need to raise it?!


I'm still interested to see morbids renders though!

I've just recently had switched over to 32bit rpfs so I'm I'm still trying to figure out how to go about finding good AA settings.