Pre Animation IR Map question

[michaelinitaly]

Hi,
I would like to pre render every 10th frame before I do my animation to get a ir map. Can someone tell me what setttings will get the best results. I have tried to do it with switch to map and with this switched off and get different results.
I used incredemental add to current map with a blank map to start. I stopped a few times to save the map as progressed and I the size did not always increase. What I mean is at frame 150 the file was 3 mg.. at 300 the file was 9 mg at 750 the file was 4 mg. I was stopping in between and rendering a few samples and may have not had consistant settings ie the switch to saved map. duh....
any help would be great.
michael

[natty]

hi ... you are on the right track but you dont need to keep stopping and saving, with incredemental add to current map it saves it every 10th or how many you have told it to

[michaelinitaly]

Natty.. my machine only saves it when it has finished the total render job. I have watched it and it for instance on this job, I did 600 frames and rendered every 10 frames. Until I completed the entire job, it sat at something like 18kb then when it finished it was 32 mg.
Maybe I have my settings wrong?
thanks
Michael

[natty]

well thats the piont ... it probably holds it in the memory until complete then save's it at the end. Why do you want to keep stopping it ?

[dbuchhofer]

Thats currently the way it works.

I agree though that for sanitys sake incase of crashed renderings it would be nice to incrementally save the LightCalc..

I believe its something you can work out with Scripted callbacks, but haven't looked into it much as of yet.

[michaelinitaly]

well thats the piont ... it probably holds it in the memory until complete then save's it at the end. Why do you want to keep stopping it ?

I thought by stopping it and starting again, that I would be able to save the entire project.

I thought that each time I started it, it would use the current map and then add more. Plus I could use the other machines in the farm to start the job as the main machine went forward and made the IR

I have now run the entire scene and see the results are not the same when you start and stop as when you go all the way through.

The biggest problem I see with this system is one the time it takes to make the IR... in this case more than 26 hours, the second problem is I have one of those nice big blotches in the middle of the scene that i did not see because I had checked the do not process final render or what ever that is called.. so I did not see it and and now have to go back and fix a hundred or so images in post production.

One of the reason I switched to Vray was to get away from the long radioisty time.. I think 26 hours is also what that would have taken and I think it would have rendered faster with radiosity I could be wrong,(large scene over 3 million faces took about 40 min an image) but I like the vray finished product better.