Problems with ambient occlusion

[palosanto]

I believe I reported this a while ago and it's still not fixed. I'm never able to enable ambient occlusion in my ocean scenes, as it results always in black empty buckets. This is consistent across my scenes whenever I have an low poly ocean mesh. The material has bump mapping in one channel and also displacement in another channel.
Today I tried again and turning off AO while still rendering (with empty buckets) froze Rhino with a windows memory error although I have plenty of free memory:

[georgi.georgiev]

Thank you very much for the feedback!

Please be informed that this behavior has been logged and is still under investigation. Could you please 'Revert to Default Render Settings', set 'Irradiance Map' as primary GI engine, and enable 'Ambient Occlusion' and confirm if the issue is still reproducible?

[palosanto]

I followed your instructions and rendered at 1920x1080 and it rendered fine without empty buckets. I already used regularely IR and LC anyway. There was 21Mb of free RAM while rendering.
If I use my saved visopt from v2 it produces black buckets so there must be a setting that causes this.
Attached are the settings that cause problems.

[flat]

My customers also reported the same problem. (Black bucket occurred on GI-AO)

Is it in the Fix list?

[georgi.georgiev]

Hi flat ,

We are aware of this occurring if render settings from older V-Ray versions is used. Loading ‘.vropt’ or ‘.visopt’ files created in previous V-Ray versions is not recommended, since some outdated parameters may cause unexpected results.

Could you please use the option 'Revert to Default Render Settings' (bottom-left button in the Asset Editor > Settings tab) and confirm if this resolves the issue?

[flat]

thank you for the advice.

I will check it.

[Micha]

It could be useful if during a "Revert to Default Render Settings" the environment setup could be kept. Most it was a lot of work to fine tune the environment of a project, it's part of the artistic work. All other technical parameters are not so critical and a reset isn't a big problem. Maybe the reflection depth could be kept too, since this value is set to a scene specific minimum. Also max ray intensity could stay unreset.

Maybe other parameters could kept too, like the color mapping setup. But most important to keep are the environment settings.

[Peter.Chaushev]

The dev team has an idea of introducing partial reset function (e.g. only reset render or camera settings), however, it is not on the team's immediate to-do list.

Kind regards,
Peter

[Micha]

For reworking on old projects it would be very helpful not to reset all, only critical options. Maybe only a command could do the job, it must not be placed at the UI. An implementation would be useful soon as possible most.

[palosanto]

For reworking on old projects it would be very helpful not to reset all, only critical options. Maybe only a command could do the job, it must not be placed at the UI. An implementation would be useful soon as possible most.

I agree. Please leave environment and camera settings alone ...