Incremental Add and Network Rendering

[samuel_bubat]

Hi there,

We finally switched from 1.09 to the latest 1.47.
I made some tests yesterday and it looks that it is now possible to
to use the "Incremental Add" Option also in Network Rendering.
(Light cache as secondary)
Actually it looks much better than single frame but a bit more splotchy
than when calculated on just one machine.
I just want to go shure. Is it intended to work this way ?
Are there any things I have to take care off when rendering like this ?
I haven´t found anything in the manual.
Thank You !

[vlado]

You can use network rendering with the "Incremental add" mode only if you render different portions of the animation on different machines, and one machine renders only one portion. You need to check the "Auto-save" option so that each machine saves it's own irradiance map. Then you can merge the maps with the irradiance map viewer.

Best regadrs,
Vlado

[samuel_bubat]

Thank You... ok so it should not work in this way.

But it´s funny that it somehow gives more accurate results than
single frame at a fraction of time.. just give it a try.
Make a little flythrough scene. First bounce irrmap second lightcache.
(Low settings to make the effect more visible)
And than render the animation first in single frame mode over the network
and than once again in "incremental add" mode over the network.
(no precalculated map)
Irradiance map should be stored on some network drive of course.

Here the following happend. In single frame mode I had frame times of
10min per machine per frame (5 machines). The result had strong visible
flickering.

In incremental add mode The first frame on each machine was about 10min and than every following around 2-4 minutes.
The result was nearly clean just some very sligthly flickering was visible.
I stored just one irradiance map for all machines.
Actually i can not really imagine how this can work
But i can reproduce it.
it´s great.. cause all machine are running at full power without splitting
the scene in segments before.

[vlado]

It will work, of course, but frames rendered on different machines may have slight differences where they have different samples, which may produce some flickering.

Best regards,
Vlado