irradiance map calculation.

[lyeli]

Hi everyone my question is "what difference does saving an ir map with aa -4 -4 and an ir map aa -1, 2? Will the rendering be faster with an ir map saved with aa -1 and 2?
I'm using a dual xeon with 3.00 g processor and 1 gig ram.
Rendering time is 27 min and with saved ir map it's 17 min. What can i do to speed it up.

[Da_elf]

the whole process of using the AA at -4 -4 s now useless. basically when your doing a camera walkthrough what you need to do is to calclate the irradiance map every nth frame rather than every 1 frame. when doing this you dont want to be saving the images since this is just a pass for calculating the irradiance map. back in the old day since we were not keeping the images rendered by those irradiance maps we would turn down the AA quality to -4 -4 which rendered very fast but looked like crap. who cared we were not saving the images. just the irrdiance maps. naturally we would reset out AA when we were ready to render. however there is a toggle switch in globals now that says to calculate irradiance map only without rendering. it had a bug in it for a while where it would crash max. but i think its been fixed now.

[percydaman]

actually I wouldn't say its completely useless. recently I was rendering an irradiance map pass and for some reason after it was done, I started rendering the frames and noticed that there was some issues, they were dark and such. It led me to find that when I sent the netrender sequence, the renderslave didn't pick up some bitmaps or something hence the problem.

So personally Ive gone to having it render frames at -3,-3 for AA just so I can keep an eye on it and make sure everything is kosher.