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Heya Folks!
I'm rendering a scene with extremely shallow dof and glossy sampling so it's pretty nasty in terms of render times. I'd heard about shade maps being a great way to speed up dof but I had a few questions:
1. Is the shade map similar to an irmap or an LC map in that it's representative of the geometry / normals of the scene rather than the pixels? What I want to know is if I turn down my sampling to much lower AA while I make the shade map, does it have any effect on the final image? I've to render at 2 / 24 and noise 0.003 to get something clean enough, can I render at 1 / 4 while making my shade map and then bump up aa after? Do I need to use the same materials as in my final scene or can I put through a really quick flat grey material override on everything and still get a correct shade map?
2. You set an output path for your shade map once. Will this map save different values for each frame? If I have a scene with animated geometry will the one shade map save a different shade map per frame and read it back as appropriate?
3. If I'm only use the helper to accelerate things and not actually render stereo, is the correct thing to do just to tick off the "enabled" tick box in the helper or do I leave enabled on and then set the eye distance to 0 and only render one view?
EDIT - Turns out enabled off will make the stereo helper do nothing at all so that's 3 answered!
Cheers!
John
I'm rendering a scene with extremely shallow dof and glossy sampling so it's pretty nasty in terms of render times. I'd heard about shade maps being a great way to speed up dof but I had a few questions:
1. Is the shade map similar to an irmap or an LC map in that it's representative of the geometry / normals of the scene rather than the pixels? What I want to know is if I turn down my sampling to much lower AA while I make the shade map, does it have any effect on the final image? I've to render at 2 / 24 and noise 0.003 to get something clean enough, can I render at 1 / 4 while making my shade map and then bump up aa after? Do I need to use the same materials as in my final scene or can I put through a really quick flat grey material override on everything and still get a correct shade map?
2. You set an output path for your shade map once. Will this map save different values for each frame? If I have a scene with animated geometry will the one shade map save a different shade map per frame and read it back as appropriate?
3. If I'm only use the helper to accelerate things and not actually render stereo, is the correct thing to do just to tick off the "enabled" tick box in the helper or do I leave enabled on and then set the eye distance to 0 and only render one view?
EDIT - Turns out enabled off will make the stereo helper do nothing at all so that's 3 answered!
Cheers!
John
