backburner and incremental add to current map....?

[super gnu]

hi all, i have a flythrough to render which contains dozens of 3d people. ive tried calculating every frame, but in order to get no flickering, i have to whack the settings up waaaay high, to the point where i get 9 hr frames. obviously this is useless, so ive settled on calculating the lighting for the building, minus the people, then adding the people and setting to incremental add to current map. this means the people get a degree of bounce lighting (not accurate i know but... ) and i dont have to do any more comping. (already 8+ layers to comp...) problem is, i have to calculate lighting with people hidden at first, to avoid contact shadows in the initial people positions. this is fine on my workstation, but when i send to net render, how on earth do i tell the renderboxes which irradiance map to load?? if i do "from file" and choose a map, i cant do "incre mental add.." and if i do incremental add, i cant specify a map to load.....


any ideas? dont wanna have to render this locally!

[Da_elf]

dont forget that the vray imap viewer can join imaps.

[super gnu]

i wont! can u see a way that this would help in my circumstances? any tips appreciated

problem basically is telling the render nodes to load an irradiance map, so they can do "incremental add to current map" because without the ability to load a map first, this feature is useless... fine if you are rendering on one machine, cos u can just load a map, start a render, and bingo, its there to be incrementally added to. not so simple in net redering tho.


irr. map viewer is cool to merge a few maps together, and if i have to im sure i can do something with it, but is there not a technique for doin what i want, without reverting to manually merging maps?

[RErender]

I have added this option to my imap control script

http://www.varcht.com/files/VArcht T...ap_Control.mcr

If you want to try it just replace the old macro with the new one (it is in 3dsmax#/ UI/macroscripts) and restart max (if you had the old one). Or just copy it to 3dsmax#/ UI/macroscripts

Then load your imap for the base geometry, press "activate" and check "Add to base imap per frame:" and render away (note the callback script is removed if you close the dialogue, so keep it open while rendering)

[super gnu]

excellent... thanks a lot

so once i have set the base irradiance map, and selected to incrementally add to that file, i just send to net render as normal? i assume i will need the script installed on all renderboxes?

[RErender]

No need to install on all renderboxes, the script imbeds itself into the file as a callback, just make sure the script is active when you send the job to the queue.