Save of irr. maps with backburner in 3dsmax7 - fixed in sp1

[vlado]

Check out the Announcements section, it contains a recent topic with a link to the imap viewer; basically this is in the Docs section on the download page on our site.

Best regards,
Vlado

[vlado]

According to discreet, the irradiance-map-not-saving thingy will be fixed in the next service pack for 3dsmax.

Best regards,
Vlado

[percydaman]

good news!

[Syclone1]

According to discreet, the irradiance-map-not-saving thingy will be fixed in the next service pack for 3dsmax.

Best regards,
Vlado

So in other words 3dsmax 8

-dave

[tricky]

In really plain and simple terms (I'm a really plain and simple person), could someone please explain exactly how to install the script and make a button? I've dragged it into a viewport and nowt seems to happen. I think it says 'installation complete', but then what do you do?

[vlado]

It seems that things are working again in Service Pack 1 of 3dsmax 7.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Da_elf]

anything NOT working with sp1 that we should know about?

[tricky]

I'm still getting some problems with SP1 and network rendering from saved solutions. At the moment, it seems that I can net-render perhaps every 10 frames of a 0-50 anim path, save the solution and use that solution to render the frames. This works OK. But when I do every 10th on a 0-250 anim path, the solution doesn't seem to save properly. Its there, and has a file size as I would expect, but when I render from it, the renders are very dark as though the solution has been switched off.

Anyone else have this?

[biglolly]

VArcht Imap Control

This handy wee script stopped working when we moved to max 9 - does anyone know if it has been recompiled for max 9? The reason I ask, is we are now having difficulty in saving our our imaps.

We end up having one big irradiance map file, but if the render crashes, we lose all the work. Using max 9 and backburner, is there any way of saving an incremental irradiance map file, but in case of a crash, you are able to go back to the previous imap?

[vlado]

If you have selected the "auto-save" option for the irradiance map, and the "save maps per frame" option is on, then V-Ray will save the incremental map at the end of each frame, so if a rendering crashes, you still have the intermediate map, which you can use to continue the calculations from the crash point.

Best regards,
Vlado

[RErender]

Hi lolly, not sure if it is max9 that broke it , I did fix it to work with the RC's. Do you have the latest version?

http://varcht.net/index.php?option=c...d=13&Itemid=28

If it still does not work in 9 for you let me know and I'll see to it.

[jonahhawk]

ReRender,

thank you so much for the IMap Control script. It saved my butt! I ran every 50 frames on a long camera path (4250 frames) the final IMap will be over a gig. Maybe my settings are too high...

Do you know if the IMap is loaded dynamically? I doubt it is but it would be nice if it just loaded the bit it needed for each frame.

thanks again

jonah

[RErender]

wow, yeah that is a big Imap, afaik vray does need to load the whole imap into memory, might still render if the scene does not need too much memory.

It might work to break it up into a few pieces, merge the imaps from say 0-1000 and render frames 0-800, merge imaps from 600-1600 and render frames 801-1400. This way hopefully the imap info in the overlaps would be close enough not show differently in the rendered frames. I haven't tried it but it seems like it would work, you could test it by just rendering a few frames in the overlap area from each map and see i there is a big difference.

[jonahhawk]

Yes. This is the conclusion I came to as I fell asleep worrying about it last night/this morning. I did send some frames with a 600mb Imap from the first 15 files. all of the render farm machines erred out on RAM. I'm going to try 300mb chunks. And also, I will to the precalc again with lower settings and longer interval.

I have a question about IncAdd vs Single frame with this script. it looks like the IMap sizes vary quite a bit from one interval to the next. there are 8mb files between two 40mb files at 50 frames apart. I would assume this has something to do with how the farm works; Given that each node gets a random sequence of frames due to the different speeds of each node. A node might get frames 0 150 500 750 1150 etc. It incrementally adds each to the IMap in memory so each IMap grows as time goes on. Would it not be better to simply save new IMaps at each interval?

Also, I precalced using a spherical camera so that it would have greater coverage per frame of precalc. Does this add to the size as well?

[RErender]

Yes. This is the conclusion I came to as I fell asleep worrying about it last night/this morning. I did send some frames with a 600mb Imap from the first 15 files. all of the render farm machines erred out on RAM. I'm going to try 300mb chunks. And also, I will to the precalc again with lower settings and longer interval.

I have a question about IncAdd vs Single frame with this script. it looks like the IMap sizes vary quite a bit from one interval to the next. there are 8mb files between two 40mb files at 50 frames apart. I would assume this has something to do with how the farm works; Given that each node gets a random sequence of frames due to the different speeds of each node. A node might get frames 0 150 500 750 1150 etc. It incrementally adds each to the IMap in memory so each IMap grows as time goes on. Would it not be better to simply save new IMaps at each interval?

Also, I precalced using a spherical camera so that it would have greater coverage per frame of precalc. Does this add to the size as well?

yes and yes