Irradiance map crashing.

[Tobias Jansson]

Hi!
I have a lot of problems calculating the irradiance map for a walk through animation, I have very low samples and have set the following parameters in the system dialog..

Max tree depth: 30, afaik should be low if problems occur.

Min. leaf size: 0.005m, afaik should be increased if problems occur.

Face/level coef: 3.0 afaik should be increased if problems occur

Dynamic memory limit: ? have no idea what this does please help

Default geometry: set to Dynamic

bucket size set to 8x8

image sampler - set to Adaptive QMC to save RAM

I am using a Very low irradiance map setting, 4 HSph sub. and 4 Interp. not enough to give me decent quality but the only way to get Max not to crash during ithe irradiance map calculation. I render every 20th frame. The complete map is about 500Mb and looks fine in the irradiance map viewer, when I render Vray says that the map is loaded succesfully, but the rendering is without any GI only direct light is visible, is this a memory problem? Rendering a teapot this way works great but as soon as I try to do something serious I get all these problems.

If anyone have any kind of advice please help, and yes I have read the Vray troubleshooting guide
Thanks!
/Tobias

[flipside]

check the vray text box if it lists any errors during the ir map calculation. Do you turn off the rendering itsself when calculating the ir map? I mean, are you sure it is the ir map causing the trouble?

bucket size of 8*8 is not a good idea. IR map uses low res version of your image to calculate the passes (depending in your min/max rate). But it does this per bucket. Calculating ir map with for example -4/-1 on a 8*8 pixel bucket would mean that you are in fact doing the first pass on a 0.5*0.5px bucket... Don't think vray can do anything with that. Use at least 48*48 and preferably higher, like 64*64. It depends a bit on your min/max rate and resolution of your image, but 8*8 is useless I think.

[Neilg]

If youre on very low, how long is your animation to get a 500mb file?

Ive used very high on a 600 frame animation filled with furniture (dining hall) every 30 frames and it's been less than 200mb.

How much RAm do oyu have, you on 64bit? Although you dont know what the dynamic memory limit is, what is it? I tend to go to 800 and thats fixed a few small problems, think it just helps with things like proxies.

[Tobias Jansson]

Hi again!

My animation is about 2800 frames, I calculated the map every 15 frame, the reason I used so small buckets is because it said in the troubleshoot to use small buckets to reduce memory, maybe a went a bit overboard.. I have now managed to get a map that is about 350Mb and still good, AND it renders fine but I only rendered every 30 frame so I might have to do some extra irradiance calc. and merge them with the viewer. On a side note it says in vray that Incremental calculation only takes samples where necesary, then why is a every 10th frame calculation about four times bigger that a every 30th frame calc.? that uses the same settings. Thats doesn't seem right or am I missing something?

Thanks for all your help!
/Tobias