mip_fgshooter equivalent in Vray

[LudvikKoutny]

Hi,

Mental Ray has quite smart solution for flickering reduction in animation when using cached GI solutions (irradiance cache in case of vray). It basically shoots IC samples from several static cameras along the camera path instead of one moving cameras. As a result, it produces to some point flicker-free animation even in scenes with moving objects, light sources, and so on. Only limitation is that camera path must not me too long or complex.

In Vray, there are many Irradiance Cache modes, but they all are quite a pain in the ass to use, requiring first changing frame range to add some offset space, rendering initial IC pass, saving the map, then some loading, reverting time range settings, and rendering. This PITA workflow makes it unusable in production scenarios where i need to send many jobs to the farm and have just not time to do these kinds of workarounds. The beauty of FG_shooter is that nothing differs from regular rendering. Just just flip it on, pick how many cameras you want to distribute along path, any you are good to go. No double rendering, no saving and loading, no time range modifications... Just one render submission, like with regular render.

So i wonder if i am blind, or if Vray really does not have this elegant and easy solution? Most of the time, BF+LC is quite sufficient and fast enough, but sometimes, it's waste of time for some very simple scenes.

[vlado]

I believe you are looking for the "Use camera path" option in the irradiance map settings.

Best regards,
Vlado

[LudvikKoutny]

I believe you are looking for the "Use camera path" option in the irradiance map settings.

Best regards,
Vlado

Yep... so the "I am blind" variant is the case here Thanks a lot! I would expect to find it in modes though.

By the way, two more questions:

Does it work as simply as it's mental ray counterpart? Just click the checkbox and render?

And where do i define how many segments is the camera path divided into?

[jacksc02]

You dont need to define the segments it just uses the cameras movement. You may need to add more samples to the LC depending on how long your camera path is.

[svetlozar.draganov]

And where do i define how many segments is the camera path divided into?

The samples will be evenly distributed throughout the whole path - if the end result is not sufficient you could increase the quality by raising up the amount of IM-subdivisions.

[LudvikKoutny]

I have tried all possible solution, but nothing seemed to work...

So only way to get flickerfree animation without brute force is doing these extremely annoying prepasses and then switching of saved GI maps and rendering final image in another phase.

That was my whole point. In Mental Ray, you just enable the feature, and render ahead. In Vray, you have to first do manually prepass for LC and IM, then switch to read GI from those files, and then render again final animation. That is just inconvenient workflow when you have to submit a lot of animation jobs, and have to do this extremely time consuming manual workaround for every single of them. It consumes a lot of time, and it adds a lot of space for error.

What i wanted was a solution, that would not differ from brute force rendering workflow-wise. Mental Ray allows that. Vray is obviously way behind in this particular case.

[vlado]

I have tried all possible solution, but nothing seemed to work...

Then it would be best to get us a scene to look at. It may be possible that you have missed something. You can either send it to vraymaya@chaosgroup.com or to me at vlado@chaosgroup.com

What i wanted was a solution, that would not differ from brute force rendering workflow-wise. Mental Ray allows that. Vray is obviously way behind in this particular case.

<shrug> Can't be ahead of everyone in everything all the time (plus, the world is moving away from cached GI anyways). But I still think that it is possible to find a simple solution for your case and we can help with that.

Best regards,
Vlado