Per Frame Light Cache update

[im.thatoneguy]

Does the additive light cache only write out when the sequence is complete not on a per frame? Is there a way to get it to write out per-frame? I had a crash to desktop last night but it doesn't look like it added to it at all.

[im.thatoneguy]

Actually it looks like it might just be a generic bug and maybe it crashed on the first frame last night.

[2015/Sep/29|10:15:31] error: UNHANDLED EXCEPTION: Irradiance map thread
Last marker is at ./src/globillummap.cpp, line 1692: GlobalIllumMap::buildLightMap() {1}

I'll try to catch the error in the act. There is more detail in the error prompt before Max implodes.

[im.thatoneguy]

Nope, can't screenshot it. It vanishes way too fast and is behind the Max Error submission window.

Same crash point though.

[2015/Sep/29|10:38:15]         error: UNHANDLED EXCEPTION: Irradiance map thread
Last marker is at ./src/globillummap.cpp, line 1692: GlobalIllumMap::buildLightMap() {1}

[vlado]

The light cache is not additive. Perhaps you mean the irradiance map? For that one the incremental add mode is better.

Best regards,
Vlado

[im.thatoneguy]

Yep, sorry I meant Irradiance Map. I think the problem was that I was using Camera Path but it doesn't respect scene frame range apparently (Bug?) so it was trying to irradiance map (twice) 4855 frames of camera animation keyframes and the scene size is larger than 10km so once I looked at the irradiance map it all made sense. It was trying to irradiance map 3 minutes of 10km of scene and was giving up the ghost when trying to merge the two passes.

[vlado]

Still, it shouldn't crash so if there is a way for us to reproduce that it will be very helpful.

Best regards,
Vlado

[im.thatoneguy]

I'll give it a try but the scene when fully merged is about 4GB of Max File + textures. It'll take awhile (to open ) and strip it down to something easily reproducible.

Is the lack of frame-range on Camera Path a bug or a feature request? It would be nice to set a start/end and only cache out sub-set of a camera path. It would keep the lightcache files in the MBs instead of GBs in this instance to chunk it out. Along those lines, does Vray do a frustrum/range culling on lightcache data?

[vlado]

Right now we always look at the current animation range for that; we could add parameters for it, but it's extra clutter in the settings. Maybe just something accessible from MaxScript, or a separate pop-up window.

Best regards,
Vlado

[im.thatoneguy]

I would happily advocate for at least just using the "Active Time Segment" aka the scene start/end range. I don't mind changing that pre-render. And could easily set that through an RPManger pass or Deadline pre-render script.