shademaps.. what gives.

[super gnu]

ive had mixed results using shade maps.. im not sure i understand exactly what is being cached? on one job i had excellent results, with a 4 hr render tanking 5 mins to re-render with the saved shade map ( identical render, no dof or stereo pairs)

however on my current job, it takes 20 mins to render without shade map, and 15 mins to render with. not a huge speed boost, and with dof or stereo enabled the rendertimes are still very high.

also some details of the workflow would be greatly appreciated.


as i understand it, when rendering with dof or stereo, vray may have to add some calculations to areas not covered by the shade map (areas in the second view that were occluded in the shademap calced view for example)

however if im rendering an animation using a stored imap, i have it set to "from file"

so can vray still calculate new lighting for the areas it needs to? or do i have to re-calculate the gi?

also, i calculated the shademap with a noise threshold of 0.01, as it looked ok.. now adding DOF, i want to turn noise threshold down to get less grain in render.. can i do this? will it cause vray to not use the shademap? or recalculate more of it?

more info regarding the shademap, what it does and doesnt do etc, would be -most appreciated!

[vlado]

however on my current job, it takes 20 mins to render without shade map, and 15 mins to render with. not a huge speed boost, and with dof or stereo enabled the rendertimes are still very high.

It would be good if you can get us a scene for this; it is hard to say right away what may be causing the increased render times.

also some details of the workflow would be greatly appreciated.

I'm actually working on a tutorial for this; hopefully it will be useful.

as i understand it, when rendering with dof or stereo, vray may have to add some calculations to areas not covered by the shade map (areas in the second view that were occluded in the shademap calced view for example)

however if im rendering an animation using a stored imap, i have it set to "from file"

so can vray still calculate new lighting for the areas it needs to? or do i have to re-calculate the gi?

The "From file" option should work fine in most cases.

also, i calculated the shademap with a noise threshold of 0.01, as it looked ok.. now adding DOF, i want to turn noise threshold down to get less grain in render.. can i do this? will it cause vray to not use the shademap? or recalculate more of it?

You can do that; it will not affect the way V-Ray uses the shade map.

Best regards,
Vlado