Please do not remove Irradiance Map as GI option from VRay.

[shehabeldin_ahmed]

Hello,

Checking the new features in VRay 6 update after installing it I noticed that Irradiance Map in the GI tab has (Deprecated) next to it, and when i looked at the Chaos Docs it said that Irradiance Map does not work with some of the new features in VRay and that it will be removed in future updates...

I strongly disagree with this and can't express enough how much counterproductive that would be...

With total understanding that I lose some of the new features when I choose to render using Irradiance Map, I will still choose to render using Irradiance Map over Brute Force for most of my render scenarios...

I don't want to start a debate about render quality and render time between IM and BF, but in most of my render scenarios I am able to get away with some loss in quality to get shorter render times using IM than having to deal with BF's noise.

I believe it harms no one to keep the option in the GI tab with a message explaining that it does not support some of the available features, it's not cluttering the interface in any way, and there is no point in having to dig it out of the engine's codes every time I need to use it (which will be most of the time actually).

Please leave it right there intact.

Thank you.

[matanov]

Hello,

I can totally understand what you are saying, but you are an experienced user that knows the risks and what to expect when using Irradiance Map. There are a lot of people that are new to the product or don't read the docs.

We can certainly leave it in the UI a little longer, but with each new version there will be more and more features that are not supported when using Irradiance Map.

[Pixelcon]

I am of the same opinion. BF's slowness is at loggerheads with the realities of commercial deadlines in many cases. I cannot count how many deadlines I would have missed if I didn't have IR map to fall back to. Please chaos, reconsider removing it alltogether.

[^Lele^]

James, i've shown you the power of using the right available tech on one of your scenes.
Rendertimes were comparable, quality was *monumentally* higher (the amount of fine detail the IRMap ate was enormous, just as big as the splotches it created everywhere.), and there were *zero* issues if the scene had to be animated, for camera, geo or lighting.
Every other possible tech could have been turned on (light mix, adaptive lighting, denoising, PGL) without a second thought.

If that was an IRMap project, you would have to consider what could be animated, you wouldn't have access to truly speedy tech (instead of hacked interpolations), and would be locked in a horn fight with the IRMap settings and its shortcomings.
The IRMap blurs just the GI (and with issues, at that.).
Denoising can blur whatever channel one desires: just raise noise threshold, and render the scene in the same time it'd have rendered with IRMap.

[luckett_jason@hotmail.com]

Brute Force works great in animation, totally agree it's an easier workflow than IR, but in the majority of stills as shehabeldin_ahmed mentioned it's still a no brainer to use IR+LC, speed is all, the quality is more than fine as well.

Please don't remove IR soon.

Jason

[Pixelcon]

James, i've shown you the power of using the right available tech on one of your scenes.
Rendertimes were comparable, quality was *monumentally* higher (the amount of fine detail the IRMap ate was enormous, just as big as the splotches it created everywhere.), and there were *zero* issues if the scene had to be animated, for camera, geo or lighting.
Every other possible tech could have been turned on (light mix, adaptive lighting, denoising, PGL) without a second thought.

If that was an IRMap project, you would have to consider what could be animated, you wouldn't have access to truly speedy tech (instead of hacked interpolations), and would be locked in a horn fight with the IRMap settings and its shortcomings.
The IRMap blurs just the GI (and with issues, at that.).
Denoising can blur whatever channel one desires: just raise noise threshold, and render the scene in the same time it'd have rendered with IRMap.

I agree that BF+LC of course provides monumentally higher quality, but the render took twice as long as far as I remember and that's the crux of this issue.

And while I don't think anyone is arguing that IR map will ever produce a more detailed render than BF+LC, when a deadline is approaching a/my client perceives splotches less than noise.
I wonder how many laypeople would value an IR+LC render over BF+LC with equivalent render times...

Of course I appreciate you schooling me in the render theory and I don't dare try to argue with you about this... I'm going to go and re-read our emails

[shehabeldin_ahmed]

my client perceives splotches less than noise.

This in a nutshell.

Sorry for the delayed response, I had to spend couple of hours rendering a scene with different scenarios to clear out my point.

First, I have to totally agree with Lele here, when it comes to complex scenes with lots of fine details to preserve, it is ideal to use BF+LC instead of IM+LC.

I'm not the expert here, my uncle is, he is the one teaching 3Ds Max and VRay for a living, and I'm learning both from him, according to him cranking up IM settings (Higher preset with higher subdivisions and low Interpolation) to preserve details will lead to IM taking too long to calculate much enough that at some point BF+LC will be a faster solution for such complex scenes than IM+LC, and that generally, if fine details quality is the target at any scenario then it is BF+LC all the way, but... When quality is not that much of an issue then IM+LC can do the job just fine, he calls IM a 'Cheap Cheat'...

For this scene I'm sharing, I will have to present a bunch of interior shots to my professors for evaluation, final render quality is not needed, and I'll probably be rendering hundreds of shots from that interior to present, so, I need a way to get a fast some what acceptable renders.

This shot is a simple default Vraymtl applied as override that excludes Opacity, Transparency and Lightmtl, and I rendered it with following settings:

Test02_21M with BF+LC and Denoiser at default, with Max Subdivs at 4 and Min SR at 16 and as it states it took 21 Minutes to render.
Test04_22M with IM+LC no Denoiser, with Max Subdivs at 24 and Min SR at 8 and for IM settings at Medium preset and Subdivs 80 and Interpolation 30 and that shot took 22 Minutes to render.
Test03_46M with BF+LC and Denoiser at default, with Max Subdivs at 8 and Min SR at 8 and that shot took a WHOPPING 46 Minutes to render.

Now please look at the Cushions on the Sofa and the Flowers and the Vases on the tables and the Tree to the left... Even with the 46M render with BF I still can't present that.., compared to the 22M render with IM which while splotchy (and I can some what clean those splotches in post easily) is still easy to get away with compared to BF noise. Like Pixelcon said, splotches are less annoying to inexperienced eyes than noise ( which are most of those who we have to deal with actually XD )

I only have my 4930K 6 Cores 12 Threads to use for renders, and I'm not looking for top notch quality renders most of the time, I need a cheap way to get fast some what acceptable looking renders, and IM is providing that just fine, why remove it?, and what other cheap tricks we would have access to then to get something like what IM is offering in similar render times?

It is a powerful tool that gets the job done for some of us VRay users, removing it helps achieving nothing here!, and i do understand Matanov's concern, but that can be solved easily by simply adding a small warning directly inside the IM tab at the top section explaining that it is outdated and doesn't support most of the new features, and recommend using BF instead, leaving us who know the consequences of using it to make the choice to do so at ease.

Edit: Added the same IM shot that took 22M to render after editing it in Photoshop in just less than a couple of minutes to remove some of the most visible splotches (Test04_22Me). And keep in mind that only those who saw the side by side can tell what is going on, but if that was the only shot presented, I would be able to get away with it just fine.

[Pixelcon]

If you want to talk settings with the devs, first thing to remember is never to change the Min SR from its default setting...

[shehabeldin_ahmed]

If you want to talk settings with the devs, first thing to remember is never to change the Min SR from its default setting...

Hahaha XD , I do agree with that too though, I only change it from 6 to 8 out of Binary habit, and I just noticed I accidentally wrote the IM+LC render settings wrong, it was set to Min SR 8 not 16, I only changed it to 16 for the first BF+LC test when I had Max Subdivs set at 4 trying to get a low render time from BF.

I fixed the number in my previous post.

[shehabeldin_ahmed]

Here is a final example to explain why IM+LC is the ideal GI setup for me and for most of my render scenarios.

This is a quality render of a scene, and it generally resemble the type of most renders that I'll be doing. (I'd be more than glad to share the scene with the devs to look at it)

I rendered a shot from that scene with BF on different settings and with IM once.

All the settings are set to default everything. Resolution is 1920x1080

I changed only the Max Subdivs (8 and 24) when rendering with BF to get different render times, and saved the shots with and without Denoiser applied. (Denoiser is always set to Default)

Here are the results:

CR_Cam01_BF(8_75M Is rendered with BF and Max Subdivs 8 with Denoiser applied, took 75 Minutes to render.
CR_Cam01_BF(8_75M_NoD Is the same shot but saved without Denoiser to demonstrate the details lost when applying Denoiser.
CR_Cam01_BF(24)_307M Is rendered with BF and Max Subdivs 24 with Denoiser applied, took 307 Minutes (5 Hours and 7 Minutes)!
CR_Cam01_BF(24)_307M_NoD Same shot but saved without Denoiser.
CR_Cam01_IM_83M Is rendered with IM set to Low preset and default Subdivs 50, default Interpolation 20 and Multipass is turned Off, Max Subdivs 24, no Denoiser, took 83 Minutes to render.

Now, I don't know which is physically correct, but the reflections and shadow of the objects on the console to the right looks far more appealing with IM than BF!, specially the shadow with the color bleed, looks so off! (even if it was the correct result!), and the ceiling on top of the Library looks brighter in BF, while the darker tone in IM again looks more appealing!, also the chess timer glass looks brighter with BF than with IM, not sure which is correct, but for me, I like it with IM, let alone the fact that the Library's wood texture even with the 5 hours render with BF still loses details when Denoiser is applied, compared to the IM 1 Hour and 23 Minutes render!

For me, and for most of my render scenarios IM would be the go to, regardless of all the other features I lose access to in the process... Not having IM in VRay will kill the engine for me, please let it stay.

Thank you.

[carlos_couto]

In the last years I'm using brute force only, However i want to have the option to speed up things when I´m rendering animations. Don't remove IM please, it's perfect to render flythroughts with static meshes with no need to render GI every frame! Let it stay!

[Joelaff]

It’s been few months since I said this… so here we go again…

The concept of removing a feature because some inexperienced or uneducated (didn’t tread the docs) user might be confused by it is utterly ridiculous.

I guess we should remove the ability to render animations because some users don’t understand animations???

Please don’t remove features unless there is a very good technical reason for doing so. Cleaning up the UI so as not to confuse users who don’t read the docs is a great way to dumb down software until it devolves into a phone app with single button.

This is a technical job/hobby requiring the users to educate themselves at least in the areas they wish to make use of. Please don’t make the rest of us suffer because some people can’t or won’t Read The Friendly Manual.

No matter how obscure or seemingly useless the feature there are most definitely at least a few users who rely on it regularly.

[shehabeldin_ahmed]

In fact, the easiest way to work around this and solve the entire situation is to simply remove IM from the GI tab and add an option under Settings tab under System to re-enable IM back under GI tab with a warning that it not compatible with some of the new features. Those who don't know won't find it under GI tab, and those of us who need it can enable it back. Everyone's happy.

Beside, IM is the only tool left in VRay that allow any tinkering around for optimization!, the direction of going with the 'one button to rule them all' and removal of any optimization is against every thing that made VRay preferable at first place, the variety of options it had before, allowed users to get something usable within short time on their low end hardware like mine, without that, the appeal of VRay will be reduced, might as well just use the default free Arnold that comes with 3Ds Max and let it take forever to render if that will be the case on both engines.

On the Brute Force side, (And I would like to report this as a bug), When I checked my scene that I shared shots from earlier for that bright area above the library, because I believe there should be consistency between BF and IM in terms of GI output, but that was not the case here, and it turns out that this bright area is a light leak from the lights in the library to the ceiling above!.

BFvsIM Shows the area I'm talking about
LightMix_001 Shows that light alone from the Light Mix with the leak on the ceiling
LightMix_002 Shows that light disabled.
LightMix_003 Shows that light with new color to confirm it is the cause of the leak

I recreated this scenario three different times in a fresh max scene every time, creating a Box with Shell as a room, and a Box with Inset then Extrude to the inside for the library and a Vray light Plane pointing down placed inside close to the top inside corner (but not intersecting with any faces of the library) around 3CM away from the back and 3CM below the top, With the settings shown in image Light&Exposure_Settings, The gap between the library and the ceiling is around 30CM and 2CM away from the back wall behind it, with a default VRay material applied on the room and a default VRay material applied on the library but with slightly darker diffuse color ( 10 instead of 128 )

In each of the three attempts the same thing happened every time, the light inside the library caused a light leak on the ceiling above!, and that is with Brute Force + Light Cache for GI and all default VRay settings all around, both Bucket and Progressive, booth times with and without any Render Elements added.

That never happened with Irradiance Map + Light Cache as GI.

[Joelaff]

Did you try upping the retrace threshold? Start with the Animation preset. Then try higher number of samples and retrace threshold. Usually cleans most of that up.

[shehabeldin_ahmed]

Did you try upping the retrace threshold? Start with the Animation preset. Then try higher number of samples and retrace threshold. Usually cleans most of that up.

Thanks... Actually, I didn't change any other options for consistency between the two GI engines during testing, but now that you mentioned it I just went back and changed the Light Cache preset to Animation and that straight forward removed the light leak on the ceiling with BF, on the cost of a slightly more noise to clean in this area and slightly longer render time, for what is already taking long to render. XD

I know I need me a hardware upgrade at some point, but till then I don't think I can afford the BF render time. XD