Large Irradiance Maps 1.5gb's!

[tonymacdonald]

Ive just encountered major rendering issues using pre-calculated lighting. I've calculated the lighting for an animation using the following settings:
Primary bounce: Light cache/6000subs/ Flythrough
Secoundary bounce: Irradiance map
The irradiance maps have been set to animation - high/ full resolution 1024x576/ calculating every 10th frame. This has resulted in the irradiance maps being extremely high in file size in some cases over 1.5gb's.

In past projects I have reduced the resolution and used lower settings. For this animation I decided to use much higher settings to achieve a better result.

Ive now supplied the files to a professional rendering bureau and they are having major issues trying to read the light maps through their network. They have 200 cores and nothing has started rendering. All has frozen up.

Have I gone over board with the lighting calcs on this one? Are the files sizes just too big to use? Id appreciate any advice here. I have to met with the rendering bureau tomorrow morning to try to resolve the issue.

[jacksc02]

Tony,
Try using IRmap for your Primary and LC for the secondary.
That should reduce the size of IRmap and increase the quality as well.

[werticus]

I am rendering from a saved IR map that is 2.8gb is size as I type this... (and an LC file that is 200mb)

It is certainly a problem when half the render time (of the ir pass) towards the end is just the saving of the file... Not that the total size is 3gb is a problem it is that it seems to need to write out the entire file each time its saved...Perhaps it could benefit from some kind of streaming system here Valdo?

During the final render the first 10mins is spend loading the file but subsequent frames are fast. (this is all on 1gb network)

A solution to the problem: In order to get the rendering going the render farm would have to stagger start the machines or the file host would simply thrash out...or the file could be placed locally on each machine and pointed to with c:\ir.irmap or some such local address.