Start raytracing while IRmap finishes?

[digitalx3d]

Hi guys...
maybe this has been considered already, or maybe it is simply not possible. I was just sitting here watching my image render. I'm using DR, and while the last slave machine was working on the last of the buckets during the IRmap pass, I was wondering if or why the other machines could not begin the final render pass on the 'idle' parts of the image. No possibility of this??

Thanks!

[vlado]

I think, the better option is not to use the irradiance map altogether

Best regards,
Vlado

[digitalx3d]

Vlado... you are a very funny man!!

Ditch the IR map??? Time is money my friend! Admittedly, I haven't tested my scenes with brute force lately, but the IR maps have always been multitudes faster. There are probably a fair number of people that will disagree with me, but a properly tuned IR/LC setup, to the eye of the client, is mostly indistinguishable from a BF rendered image. (I should preface this by saying my viewpoint comes from the world of arch-viz, not FX) And if the client could see them side-by-side and see a difference, I very much doubt they would care. These days people want stuff as fast as humanly possible. I hear/see a lot of artists waiting 10+ hours for a single rendering. Or even 1 hour for a low-res client draft image. If I had to wait that long for renders (most of my drafts render in 5 minutes or less), I honestly believe my productivity would drop 3-4x. Maybe more?

These days, speed is king. Cheers to you and your team for creating such a great and FAST renderer! I've tried Corona... even with it's denoise... it's still half the speed of Vray. Corona users say the quality is better. And while it's NICE... it's really just DIFFERENT.

Anyways... my point is... IRmap is incredibly fast. If I find some time, I'll test a couple brute force renders and see if I can come close to the same speed.

[samuel_bubat]

We try to avoid IR map wherever possible. But the truth is we still use it in probabely 50% of our renderings. Sometimes when need to start and finish projects within one day. We´re really happy beeing able to to render final images in 10 minutes with irradiance map. Sometimes we need speed not quality. For us the irradiance map is a very important part of Vray. Please don´t forget the irradiance map and give it some love from time to time

[M.Max]

For us the irradiance map is a very important part of Vray. Please don´t forget the irradiance map and give it some love from time to time

+100
IR map is one of the main reasons(if not the top one ) behind choosing V-Ray for our studio work !

[Neilg]

yeah we are doing an animation right now that renders in 30 minutes a frame from a precalc IRmap - with brute force it's around 6 hours a frame, still noisy, and the denoiser doesn't work with the elements we need. we have an unbelievably long way to go before we can consider ditching it.

[theedge]

Same here. IR map still totally has its place in my workflow when multi-hour rendering is not an option.