GI Cheats for water render?

[Nickh]

Hi,

I am trying to find the quickest render solution for my current situation:

I have 2 renders to an animation, base + water. Base is done, so just looking for best approach with realflow mesh pass. Currrent (too slow) approach is:

Everything in scene apart from water is set to Matte.

Pass 1:

primary: irradiance map on one machine, multiframe incremental on every frame
secondary: Brute

pass 2:

primary: irradiance, from
secondary: Brute

Now I know the animation prepass is supposed to speed things up, in that I can send the irradiance map to multiple machines, but whenever I try it is not only slower at doing the irradiance, but also the render. so overall I have not seen benefit to it yet, unless anyone can persuade me.

I was wondering if there was any tricks like putting the base render in the environment refraction override to simplify things and create reflection planes for the environment, or possible even do away with GI completely as a crazy thought. Although the camera is very close to the water. I've tested this but I've not got it looking good yet, but maybe I need to persevere?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers
Nick

[Nickh]

Or have just thought of camera mapping maybe, and projecting the base render on to the geometry so the water is refracting this rather than all the original reflect\refracts (water is going over lots of gold and crystal)

one to try in the morning, but any others appreciated...