prepass / flythrough caching in scene with animating lights

[Bertjenkins]

Hi

I have a scene in which various lights animate in intensity, like a flickering neon light. Some are inside transluscent objects. However nothing in the scene moves, apart from the camera which flies through the scene. Does this mean i can use light cache flythrough's and irradiance map prepassing?

thanks

[stezza]

Yes
No need to calculate your maps at every frame if your camera is quite slow then a calculation of every 5 to 10 frames will do you.

[super gnu]

well it depends if you want the animation of the lights to affect the GI or not. using any form of cached precalculated GI (apart from animation mode, perframe cached imaps) will result in static GI. if the lights are not major scene lightsources, then it wont matter if the gi is static. however if all the lights in your scene are animated in intensity over a decent range, static gi is gonna look pretty odd.

[Bertjenkins]

Yes looking at the GI pass, it seems to affect the mostly the SSS material which the light shines through. So i guess i need it per frame as the material is changed quite a lot when the light is on or off. Was that what you meant?

In which case, how do you change the per frame value on animation mode?

[super gnu]

i dont understand exactly your question, but all the settings are detailed here.

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/maya...vancedimap.htm

[Bertjenkins]

Hi thanks for that. I'll check it out.

What i meant was, the thing that mostly changes in the scene is the transluscent objects, I was initially worried that compromising GI would affect their look. I couldn't really understand if they would be affected by static GI, but looking at the GI pass they change as the light intensity changes, so I'm guessing they will need more than just static GI? Or have i misunderstood how GI affects surfaces like SSS with different light intensities?