Does Light Cache get merged into irradiance map?

[davision]

I almost never use the Light Cache -- I usually do single bounce Irradiance map rendering to save render time. Since I rarely use LC I'm confused on how to best implement it now.

There is an OLD tutorial in the Vray manual about rendering a walk-through animation. It seems to have some irrelevant information now since it doesn't mention the Use Camera Path option for IRR and instead uses Multiframe Incremental. It talks about pre-calcing the IRR and LC and then reload them for the final pass.... seems straightforward.

But there is another tutorial in the manual which seems more recent and it covers moving objects. In that tutorial, it says to pre-render the IRR and LC and then on the final pass, that you should turn OFF secondary bounces and just load the IRR map in the first bounce. I don't understand that. Why wouldn't you load the light cache file you just created? Is it somehow merged with the irradiance map?

On the walk-through animation, you DO load the LC for the final pass (which is what I'd expect) and on moving objects you don't -- so I'm wondering why there's a difference between the two methods?

[Svetlozar Draganov]

It would be better if you could post the links to the tutorials along with the questions since the answer might vary depending on the setup.

In general Irradiance Map could and will store the secondary bounce engine information inside itself - this includes not only LC but Brute Force as well.

The reason because LC could be loaded from file for walk-through animations and not loaded for animations with moving objects is that LC could store the information only for static objects in the scene which is the case with walk-through animations. When rendering animations with moving objects LC should be calculated for every frame - that's why there is no point to pre-calculate it.