Vray Imap DR-Bucket compression

[trixian]

It seems lately that DR nodes returning buckets during imap calculation are sometimes severely compressed (or what ever is going on). This used to be only slightly, but now I'm having serious doubts as to whether or not the dr nodes are not picking up hdri domes and stuff that usually makes buckets look like crap. I seem to remember Vlado mentioning that the prepass-buckets are compressed now, but this is maybe a bit over the top? Could we get an option or something? How much network bandwidth are we actually saving by sending these seemingly 4 bit coloured buckets as opposed to before?


Vray 2.4.03
3dsMax Design 2014

[trixian]

Oh... forgot to add:
When working at home and running DR over vpn (I only do this on manageable scenes), The DR buckets returned during pre-pass are even worse. They look like diagonal white stripes. Not sure if this is related or even by design, but I thought it could be relevant.

[vlado]

Do you have the scene for this? It will help me to fix the issue.

Best regards,
Vlado

[trixian]

Well I do, but it uses massive resources from the network here. Proxies and an Exr for a domelight. It also relies heavily on ForestPack pro and RailClone (my new favourite plugin), so unless you have them, the scene will be mostly empty. After I'm finished I can probably use the tool for RailClone that converts it to instanced dum-objects.

But as far as the cross-hatch looking buckets over the internet through vpn, Im not sure if this will help.

[vlado]

Well I do, but it uses massive resources from the network here.

From what I can see, this happens even in the background, so you can probably just delete all the geometry from the scene...

But as far as the cross-hatch looking buckets over the internet through vpn, Im not sure if this will help.

Yeah, that one is odd. Do you have a screengrab for it too?

Best regards,
Vlado

[trixian]

I'll need to fire off a render from home later on this eventing to get a screen grab.

What do you mean delete all the geometry....you would literally end up with a scene rendering completely black wouldn't you?

[vlado]

What do you mean delete all the geometry....you would literally end up with a scene rendering completely black wouldn't you?

I can see the buckets on the background too?

Best regards,
Vlado

[trixian]

hmm...well I kinda thought you would not see the compression artefacts if they were all black.
I'll make a file with some content later this evening and post a link.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

this happens to me too very often...almost every render in larger size.
We have over 90 buckets and sometimes i also wonder whats gonna come out in the render because of those differences.
If this makes rendering faster then i understand but it shoudl be mentioned somethere in the log or there shoudl be a checkbox to use compression or not at the cost of some rendertime.
This has been happening in our scenes for past year....always being on the latest version (no nightlies)
Just my 2 cents in this issue.

[vlado]

I would still like to get a scene that demonstrates the issue

Best regards,
Vlado

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

i am going to try to use larger bucket size to see if there is any difference.
We very often use size 32.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

i am going to prepare a scene for you tomorrow Vlado

[trixian]

Ok. so I just finished making a version of this scene for you Vlado, and decided to test render it before posting.......guess what.....no strange buckets.
So I will need to find whatever was the reason.......hoping its the exr loaded in the domelight that I removed, so give me a sec.

Later on: Ok. Here is a zip with an exr for the environment. This one had artifacts, but not as pronounced as the main production render earlier.

[vlado]

Thanks; I can reproduce this here - it will be fixed.

Best regards,
Vlado

[alexyork]

Very good news to hear that.... we picked this issue up a while back in a thread I started about this same issue. Hope to see it fixed soon.