Backburn-ing precalculated light maps....

[Giovanni]

So, I studied the tutorial about how to shot an animation precalculating the light map and the irradiance map, but at the end I had questions about using backburner with this method...

So, I run some tests, and it looks like the following works:

1. Set your first GI to irr map, second GI to light cache
2. IRR map setting: multiframe incremental / don't delete / autosave ON
3. Light map setting: fly-through / don't delete / autosave / switch to
4. set frame range, every 10th frame
5. check network render (no need for save file...)

Like this, once you start the job, vray calculates the light map for the whole sequence, once, then save the map and reuses it for all other frames. The irradiance map, instead, is calculated every frame, and progressively saved to disk to a larger and larger file.

At the end, I have the two maps saved for the whole animation, ready to be used for the final animation (fully backburner compatible)

Now, something different from the tutorial on the vray help is that the tut uses both primary and secondary GI set to "light cache" to calculate the total light cache map...then it uses this map to calculate the iiradiance primary GI map...Is this making a lot of difference?

My goal is to streamline this technique, backburning the precalculation of light maps, so that they do not tie up my main station...AND I can send out preculculation for more than one camera (shot) at at a time.

Second question: is there a way to make sure that backburner assign the whole job (every 10th frame) to one specific server? Matterofactly, I tried to send out the animation as AVI or MOV, but MAX crashes. That would have probably prevented the job from being split into frames, and therefore, servers. But, is that necessary? Would have it worked accross different servers? The "help" seems to suggest no, it would have not.


I hope I made sense,

thank you

regards

gio

[dgsantana]

you only need to use in the end the irrandiance map that contains all the information, the lighcache can be discarded. we use this with backburner a lot. using dependecies works great in the queue, setting a "pass" for ligh calc and the other to render in all the "slaves"

best regards,
daniel

[Giovanni]

You mean, the irradiance map progressively saved to file every 10th frame contains also the information provided by the Light cache map?

So, for the final animation, I can safely turn off the second GI?



Thank you

gio

[dgsantana]

yes giovanni, you can use safely only the irrandiance after the calculation, the secondary GI may be set to none and won't affect nothing. if i can remember vlado also speaks of this in one of the tutorials in the manual.

daniel

[Dynedain]

Re: Backburn-ing precalculated light maps....

Second question: is there a way to make sure that backburner assign the whole job (every 10th frame) to one specific server? Matterofactly, I tried to send out the animation as AVI or MOV, but MAX crashes. That would have probably prevented the job from being split into frames, and therefore, servers. But, is that necessary? Would have it worked accross different servers? The "help" seems to suggest no, it would have not.

All you have to do, when you submit the job via backburner, is uncheck the "use all servers" checkbox, and select specifically the ones you want to use from the list it shows

[trick]

...you can use safely only the irrandiance after the calculation, the secondary GI may be set to none and won't affect nothing. if i can remember vlado also speaks of this in one of the tutorials in the manual...

If Light Cache is used for calculating the glossy effects, you still need the saved Light Cache file in the final renders !!!

[dgsantana]

well, i didn't know that!!

thanks trick