Animate DMC Color Threshold?

[bkirch]

Does anyone have a way to animate the value of the DMC Color Threshold over time? It cannot be animated directly, and it does not appear in the Wire Parameters Dialog as a controllable attribute.

I want to do this because I have a group of objects in the scene that fill about 30% of the HD frame for most of the shot, which renders in a reasonable amount of time. Then for the last ten frames or so the camera flies in and they fill the entire raster frame, making render times sky-rocket to unacceptable times. I would be great to be able to simply animate the Color Threshold for those last ten frames.

Using 3dsmax 2013 / VR 2.3

Thanks for any ideas,
-Brian

[DanielBrew]

Sometimes you can put a floatscript controller on a parameter that can be animated and use it to animate a parameter that can't. In this case you can animate the cylinder height of the override camera of the V-Ray render. So if you put a floatsrcipt controller on the height you can use it to animate the color threshold.

This seems to work for me:

(
	renderers.current.camera_cyl_height.controller=float_Script()
	renderers.current.camera_cyl_height.controller.setExpression "renderers.current.gi_irradmap_colorThreshold = (currentTime/100) + 0.1\n90"
)

You just need to work out an expression to describe how you want the color threshold to change over time.

[bkirch]

Thanks for the idea, Daniel. This is helpful.