Ok… this a “big” wish… but maybe something to consider.
In the new Renderman, you can save the irradiance map similar to Vray, etc… What you can do is to see the irradiance map in 3D by using a show command. It is very informative and cool to look around and see where samples are taken in different areas. This would be very useful for animation sequences where you would do a multiframe increamental add. The data is shown as white dots in 3D space in Renderman.
wow…interesting concept. That would let you pan around and look at the samples interactively…that would be cool!
How is renderman different from “show samples” in vray?
/Thomas
Yeah, someone asked for this a while ago… it’s coming sometime soon.
Best regards,
Vlado
i assume it would be a combination with the bake function
Here you go:
http://www.vrayrender.com/stuff/IMapViewer.zip
It’s very basic at the moment and nothing more than a “cool toy”… I’m still wondering if anything useful can come out of this, other than maybe a tool to merge and manually edit irradiance maps…
Best regards,
Vlado
First of all… I am amazed as always.
Second, I think it can be a usefull tool for debugging… It is useful for doing any sort of sophisticaled animation sequence with multiframe.
Merging things together would also be useful. To be able to do a “Open” followed by a few “Imports” (or an “Import Multiple”) then a “Save” would be VERY powerful.
Here is another idea. Select an area and do an “Add detail” to it. Maybe you could save a file that defines the areas that you want more detail, and load it in vray (the standalone when it comes out… hint, hint…) to render those areas. That way you could “paint” GI.
I have more ideas on this… maybe I could share them with you…
wow…how cool! Ask and u shall receive
vlado, can you write me a program to wash my dishes and mow my lawn? I hate to do those things…lol 
heres a screenshot of a file that came with simcloth. Probably not the reason the viewer was made, but I thought it was cool to see how small I could get the samples. Apparently pretty small
Ok… so I played with this tool… and I see it as WAY more than a toy. It is very informative. Of course it could use some tools as mentioned before since it is only a view right now.
Did a mutliframe incremental animations and looked at the result. It was very informative in telling me where samples were added and where samples are missing. I know that vray itself is good at getting the samples needed. But I can immediatly see the fast moving areas where I would need to collect more samples.
I would love to post the the vrmap file for you too see, but it is tool big for email… 25 megs… 11 compressed… sorry no website… yet.
BTW… tried to “walk-throught” the 3D space and had problems. Seems the navigation ie ment for orbit not walkthough… it would be nice to have walktough abilities to be able to see your “path” as you walk through it.
i can host it if u’d like. 11 megs compressed would work fine, small upload and small download. saves both of our bandwidth.
mail me if u’d like.
Don’t know if it is work it… people should try it themselves…
This is really cool and as cpnichols said it is extremely informative. Thanks Vlado. I have a much better idea of what’s going on with the irrad maps This viewer has created knowledge that might have been hard to get across in words.
--Jon
This is beyond cool - Just zooming around my IR maps is fun - it is like some art installation… and learning VRAY at the same time. 
Firstly well done on the viewer, However I can only get it to work with some IR maps, but not all, I don’t know the difference between the ones that work and ones that don’t, is there anything specific I should be doing so that i can see my maps in my viewer?
P.S. It doesn’t work with my v1.09 renders at all?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Can you get it?
Does anyone else have this problem? Especially with the latest version of Vray? 
You need to get an updated viewer to be able to view the irradiance maps from the latest versions. The format changed in the K build I think.
I don’t know if Vlado has posted the updated version of the Viewer yet, but I’m sure he will soon.
irmap iviewer
I’m having the same problem. . .A revised IRmapviewer would be really handy
Looks like the new irradience map is available for download at vrayrender.com.