When I have good results using detail enhancement radius 60 with screen scale on let’s say a 800 x 600 rendering, does this mean I should change the radius when increasing the resolution?
Re: detail enhancement question
No. You don’t have to change it.
Best regards,
nikki Candelero
What exactly does the radius value in Detail enhancement mean? I’ve read the help manual but its not very explicit:
Radius - this determines the radius for the detail enhancement effect. Smaller radius means that smaller parts around the details in the image are sampled with higher precision - this would be faster but may be less precise. Larger radius means that more of the scene will use the higher precision sampling and may be slower, but more precise. This is similar to a radius parameter for an ambient occlusion pass.
Does a default radius of 60 in screen mode mean that it calculates detailed IR in a 60 pixel radius around each detail? What determines a “detail”. How do I know what features in the rendering will be considered details?
To see details - turn on show samples 
And tweak your DE settings. Lower the irrmap settings and tweak tweak tweak 
hey, that sounds like what I had to do in final render, back in the day…
which is why I switched to vray about 4 years ago.
Ah fR . . . forget it . . . .
As for de - radius means area, where will be used qmc method. For ex. it found a bricks on the floor - floor sampled with irrmap (a few samples), but when it comes to bricks it starts qmc sampler, which samples 60-pixels around the place, where floor ends and a brick starts (in this case - the normals changed, that’s why it thought it must sample this place with QMC). If brick is taller, than 60-pixels, it means that other its parts will be sampled with irrmap (and I think it’s sampled at first irrmap pass, as the engine thought it’s not an enough detailed area).
Hope, you understand :roll:
P.S. To get nice and clear GI-caustics (in case you turned GI-caustics on) - you need higher radius values. Or it will be kinda mix, between loow irrmap caustics and high quality QMC ones, which sometimes makes me maad.
Paul-
That is how I understood it too. But if that’s correct, then I should change my DE radius from 30 to 150 when I go from 640x480 to 3200x2400. (In your example, the bricks would be taller in pixels.) But above, Nikki says no.
<scratches head>
In this case you need to change to world. That’s it
But I must say - possibly you just don’t need to change it, because quality would be the same… Will check this out.
Ok. You definitely need to raise the radius (of course only in screen mode), as low irrmap shadows (really baad, splotchy) would be seen, instead of qmc sampled ones.
I did some testing with a simple box floating slightly above a plane, and keeping the radius the same does not seem the right way. Most likely as it looks, is that the radius should be doubled when doubling the resolution. Now that I think of it, it seems quite logical, since it is relative to screen.
So world scale is probably a safer way to go, no worries when scaling up…
I guess one would want to set DE to world scale for interior animations?
Yes.
Best regards,
Vlado
since de is based on principal of ambient occlusion, the radius should cover the size of the scene, so that any casting objects emit full shadow. However this may produce longer render times.
If you were going to set it that high better to just use qmc and be done. I have found that 6" to 12" inches works pretty well for my scenes, gives nice shadows in tight nooks and crannies and provides grounding shadows all for the low price of maybe 10%-15% in render time.