Better Skylight+Bump with Irradiance Maps

[soulburn3d]

Currently when you render skylight and bump using the Irradiance Cache, you get what appears to be a pasted on look with the bump map. Rendering with Brute Force GI looks great, but is very slow.



Speaking to Vlado on the subject in this thread...

http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...Irradiance-map

Vlado said:

"the irradiance map stores very limited information about the directions the GI is coming from so there are limits to what it can do for bump mapping. [storing the extra information] won't slow it down, but it would make the irradiance map larger both on disk and in RAM. Seeing as how people sometimes have gigabytes of irradiance maps, we have to be careful with that."

I would like for the irradiance map to have the ability to save the extra info it needs to produce better looking bump maps, defaulted to off, so it doesn't affect people's irradiance map size in a negative way, but we can turn it on if we have major bump mapping going on and need the extra quality and are willing to get larger map sizes.

Thanks!

- Neil

[samuel_bubat]

Hey Neil,

it´s not exactely what you´re asking for, but meanwhile you could try this. In the Vray Material/options you can turn off "use irradiance map".
It will than use a Brute Force Gi on every object this material is applied to.

[soulburn3d]

That's a great tip. Not so useful if you have a lot of bump mapped objects, but great if the bumped surface is small in frame. Thanks.

- Neil