Progressive rendering - forget all I know about subdivs etc?

Not had too much opportunity to use all the new features of Vray 3 yet, but we are interested in the progressive rendering aspects. Is anybody using progressive sampling for final images at full resolutions? I’m talking print size stills, so 4k pixels and up.

Apologies for my ‘newby’ question, but if we opt for using progressive sampling, does Vray disregard all values for subdivs on materials, lights and GI, and instead just work to whatever the max subdivs is for every element of the scene?

It works exactly like the regular “Adaptive” sampler in that respect, but instead of doing buckets, imagine the image as one huge bucket and you can simply see how it is refined. The default settings are 1/100, so if your materials/lights have less than 100 subdivs, then they are pretty much ignored.

Best regards,
Vlado

So are there any speed benefits in using the progressive approach? (of course, you get an overall impression sooner, but I mean in attaining a similar render quality)

It is not faster in general; after all it’s still doing the exact same things as the bucket renderer. It has two advantages: one, you see an image faster, and two - you can let it refine for as long as you want (or as little as you can wait).

Best regards,
Vlado

OK - thanks for clarification.