Irradiance map deprecation

[matanov]

Hello,

As most of you have noticed, Irradiance map is slowly going towards complete removal from V-Ray. It's complicated to use and most of the new things in V-Ray are not compatible with it (and there will be more in the future).

The purpose of this thread is to see if anyone still uses it in V-Ray 6+ actively and most importantly - why.

[dlparisi]

I don't use it "actively" but have used it for animations with a "mulltframe incremental" saved map as it's very fast. There used to also be the use "camera path" (or whatever it was called) for the light cache that when paired with the IR multiframe map meant I could pre-calc the entire lighting for the animation, saving a lot of time. Granted this was only for a fully static scene with nothing animated except the camera and wasn't the most precise solution but it was a huge timesaver. That said I can see how deprecating it does make sense, I'll just plan accordingly for the next animation.

[Alex_M]

I've not used it in years to be honest. CPUs are a lot faster nowadays and it's been liberating not to deal with it and all the problems it causes.

[ChuckRT]

In my case I dont use it, some features like Lightmix are not compatible, yes you can transfer the info to the scene but its not really an optimal solution, you really need to understand what every setting does in order to really take advantage of it, and int deppends entirely on the scene.
For what I have read in some posts and other forums, some users still use it only for Animations

[Pixelcon]

I use it probably 25% of the time for my projects. I believe it's still a lot faster than BF in certain cases.

Edit: Ah. Maybe only 15% of the time. But it's always in emergency cases.

[trick]

Like previously mentioned: not using it anymore for stills, since you win so much time in setup and quality by using BF over the loss in rendering time. But for every animation, especially previews for clients and also in simple (and long) technical animations, multiframe incremental IM is still used, and any alternative just takes way too long ( compared to BF/LC) to get sharp noisefree animations. Especially the simple animations with lots of unicolor areas suffer too much from noise which is extra annoying compared to detailed textured scenes. So there should be an alternative for this.

[M.Max]

I don't personally use it anymore unless I have to, but I know many people who still do especially for fly through Animation where only the camera is moving.
How will removing it affect old scenes?can we still access it through maxscript?

[kosso_olli]

Have not been using IR maps in the last ten years.

[matanov]

I don't personally use it anymore unless I have to, but I know many people who still do especially for fly through Animation where only the camera is moving.
How will removing it affect old scenes?can we still access it through maxscript?

The next step is to hide it for new scenes. You will still be able to render old scenes with Irradiance Map or set it through MaxScript.

Of course it will be very useful if we have scenes where BF+LC is obviously slower than IM+LC so we can try to optimize something if possible.

[Pixelcon]

The next step is to hide it for new scenes. You will still be able to render old scenes with Irradiance Map or set it through MaxScript.

Of course it will be very useful if we have scenes where BF+LC is obviously slower than IM+LC so we can try to optimize something if possible.

I'm curious to know how much of a pain it is for Chaos to keep it. Not suggesting its removal needs to be justified; just geinuinely curious about how the 'sausage is made'

[matanov]

Keeping it will only result in more work for the support as new tech is incompatible with it. On the other side there is the tedious setup in a world where most of the times the default settings are good enough.

Technically, we don't want to invest resources that can be put into something useful.

[Pixel_Domain]

To be honest, i use IRR + LC constantly, on a daily basis. It gives such great results ( if you know how to use it ) and is MUCH faster than bruteforce, so i don't see any reasons to use bruteforce all the time instead. For animations i also prefer using Irradiance Map where i can, but for moving objects just use option built in material editor, to calculate with bruteforce by material. Very helpful option. I see no reason to give up on Irradiance map increasing rendering time several times. The result difference wouldn't even be noticeable.