ray terminator threshold

[Morbid Angel]

I just had a thought of where if one could specify a ray termination value for any ray tracing parameter such as reflection or gi or direct lights on a per object basis that would be a great option. Sort of how they use vray sphere fade, except the fading would be for rays instead of visibility.

[vlado]

This is kind of what the cut-off parameters for materials and lights do.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

kind of but i think the cutoff is based on the color brightness threshold. What I am talking about is a distance threshold. So picture a vraysphere fade like gizmo that surrounds an object and it terminates the rays inside with a falloff.

[duke2]

Yes i'd love to see this kind of thing implemented in VRay. The more optimization techniques, the better!

[vlado]

Hmm, what color would the rays fade to?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

i would imagine it would be a regular kind of falloff volume, rays would fade to the nearest color. If you would picture for example reflection, it would look like an object is inside the fog.

[duke2]

i would imagine it would be a regular kind of falloff volume, rays would fade to the nearest color. If you would picture for example reflection, it would look like an object is inside the fog.

In MR I think it's environment or Exit Color.

[vlado]

Hm, that won't work for shadow rays though...

Anyways, newer versions of V-Ray allow you to specify tracing distance for dome lights and GI, not quite the same but can be useful in some cases.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

well the reason i am asking for this is because i have an interesting situation where i have an object which is rendering pretty fast on its own, and the forest behind it which also renders pretty fast on its own, but combined, the two render much longer together. I cannot understand why this is happening...and i thought that just the raycasting from the object to the forest is dramatically increasing the render time.