QMC for first bounce

[Lupaz]

Hi,

My coments on QMC for first bounce after finishing the project:

It doesn't worth it . I finally had to turn to irradiance on the middle of the project. Render times were 3 or 4 times longer than with irradiance for an image at 4000 px (with QMC 30hs - with Irr map 8hs). I guess a great advantage on using irradiance is to include vray lights on it, not doable with QMC.

Of course I lost details.

[Morbid Angel]

Lupaz, its well known that qmc is slow. But you have to weight the importance to quality to amount of time you have and then make your decision based on that. QMC is good for cheracter animations, and etc. We never user irmaps in production of such things. Hope that explains why I have suggested what I have.

[Lupaz]

yeah, but I was just saying cuz' in my first post on this thread I said QMC was faster than irradiance (while geometry has lot of detail) and that I was concerned for the progress of the project while using QMC for first.
My (basic) conclusion is QMC for first might be fast at the early stages of a project (architectural - still images) but very slow for high resolution images with complex materials and lighting.

[peterC]

if you include vray lights in the IR map, dont you loose a lot of detailes in the render?,
been using this post as a referance and its very nice, brought my renders down from 55min to 19min ( had my noise in the LC set way too low, main reason ) and looking even better, so thanx to all.
Peter

[flipside]

Yes you loose detail, you need very high quality ir map settings to make up for that.

I always use vraylights so that I can use low ir map settings and still have nice shadow detail because of the direct light from the vraylights.

[Lupaz]

I include vraylights in the Irr map only in specific cases.
This project is an exterior facade. The vray lights are in the interior, at the entrance. It doesn't matter the quality of shadows as they are far away. This is an advantage you only get with Irr map and not with qmc.