When to use Vray HDRI map ?

[TomGore]

Do you guys always use Vray HDRI over standard 3dsmax bitmap texture in your projects? I mean even for textures like bump or glosiness? I've heard HDRI has some advantages in terms of speed, but is this true in case of standard tiff or jpeg (8bit) maps as well?
best,

[glorybound]

Converting my scene has always crashed, so I stopped bothering. I haven't tried it lately, so maybe I'll give it a go when I get a chance. I once had an interior render much faster after converting to Vray HDRI maps.

[Morne]

I've seen some tests I think Lele or one of those clever guys did showing it is a tad faster. But honestly, it was such an insignificant amount that with the hassle to convert things I too have stopped bothering with it and just use standard max bitmap. Maybe if I do an animation job with million frames, it would make a difference.

I geuss like most things, it depends on the kind of work you do. What is good enough for one person might not be for the next person

[joconnell]

Two major benefits are it's got better filtering modes than 3dsmax does to avoid moire effects on repeating patterns and it can also make use of multires exr files for textures. If you're using huge textures for environments or close up characters, you can convert your textures to a version where it keeps the full res version and then also makes a half, quarter, eight, 16th res version all the way down to something tiny (maybe 8x8 by default?) so if an object is far away, vray will use a lower res version of a texture to take down your memory overheads. There's better colour support in the hdri map than the default bitmap also!

[rivoli]

I've been using it exclusively for several years now, regardless of file depth. I started using it instead of max native bitmap loader mainly for better filtering, but I guess other advantages have been accumulating over the years, as John pointed out.

[glorybound]

I just tried to convert my scene and like usual, it crashes. I haven't tried in many months, it doesn't seem like much has changed with it as far stability.

[Moriah]

Is there any way so that when we drag textures from the windows explorer to max, it creates a vrayhdri instead of a bitmap ? This would be very useful...