Distributed GI calculations

[shaneburger]

I am probably mentioning something that has already been mentioned, but a serious timesaver (and quality increaser!) would be to have the GI calculations be able to be done across a network farm of computers. THEN, I would be able to use 10 machines or more to calulcate a "Very High" irradiance map without it being an overnight or weekend gig.

Any chance this is being implemented in 1.5 for Max6? It wasn't in the beta.

shane.

[travistlo]

Yes that would be nice, but i think the methods of GI calculations that vray uses makes it pretty hard to implement. (making assumption, correct me if im wrong)

I think the methods use alot of interpelations/random/rounding of numbers, that it makes the shadows a little bit different each time it calculates it. This would mean that each bucket would be slightly different. It seems that the thing that makes vray so fast is also holding it back from the DR GI calcs.

But im sure they are thinking of ways to accomplish this, alot of people would love this feature.

I have succesfully rendered large images with the GI calculated over a network using buckets. The one thing i had to do was have extremely high settings for the Irrad map. so there wasnt any difference between the buckets. Also you cannot save the irr. map, so if it crashes, your SOL.

tlo

[tom schuelke]

Well we know dr is difficult to do for max 6 so this is the reason why this so much wanted thing isnt in allready (discreet support for vlado and peter seem to be horrible as i have heared).

but what you want works well with stripe set rendering. the lightmap and the imap seem to be calculated pretty well only for the part of the stripe, the network computer calculates.

Tom