Npr

[wxyz]

Want to do a pointillistic animation that looks like it does just before the render process starts. How do I stop the interpolation?

[crazy homeless guy]

I suppose you could just check don't render final image, but I would be interested to see if there are variances between frames.

[add101]

Do you want the irradiance map or light cache preview/calculation? How it looks just before render starts depends on whether 'show calc. phase' is on for light cache only, or if it's on for the irradiance map as well.

Just did a quick test, and the light cache seems to be more like the pointilist style.
If you want to render in a similar style to the light cache calculation phase you could use light cache as the primary gi engine.
For an animation you can save the light cache for the animation path, and render from saved map to avoid variances between frames.

[wxyz]

Thanks to all...very helpful