Is this going to work?

[sv]

Have a quite big scene, about 12 - 15 Xfrog trees in it. Have 1000 frames of animation to produce, with GI.

Am rendering out the lightCache and the Irradiance map every 25 frames. However, the lightCache process has crashed about three times now at about 60% of the way through.

It completes successfully without the Xfrog trees in it.

Can i render the LightCache without the trees and use that in the final rendering with the trees in? What kind of effect will this have? The direct light render shadows out shouldn't it? I'm not at all asked about having colour bleed or anything like that, so will this work?

Runnind a P4HT 3.4Ghz with only 1 gig of ram - i'm sure it's a lack of memory problem which is why it's failing.

Any thoughts? (don't say get more memory)

[RErender]

should work if you set the trees to invisible to GI in the vrayproperties.

[gadzooks]

you could always render the trees in a seprate pass. And then composite them in post. Of coures you would need either Combustion, Shake,Digital Fusion,After effects to do that. I think the trees have to be included in the lightmap during the caculation. Gadzooks

[jujubee]

What happens if you set your trees to be vrmeshes???

[CCS]

Curious what you come up with here as I have a similar situation looming. vrmeshes will probably help, but I'd still try the separate irmap you're talking about, along with Eric's suggestion about excluding from GI.

I'm curious about the "separate pass" comment. I've seen this stated before, but I don't understand it. I understand rendering specular, shadows, zdepth, etc. as "passes", but how do you render specific objects in passes??? And when you do so, how do you get tree shadows on modeled terrain, or reflections of trees in windows?

Thx

[tammo]

Dont use lightcache for long animations,
use irradiance map only.
If you REALLY need secondary bounces use QMC for that.
for outdoor scenes the first bounce is enough.
Secondary just kills contrast.

for my last outdoor project i turned off GI and used the domelight.
Faster rendertimes and you can move objects like cars in your scene.

[CCS]

Eric-

Tried what you said on a small scene, but trees not involved in initial IR calc don't cast shadows. Any thoughts? (Using an IES sun, nothing is excluded.)

Need to try tammo's idea too....