Hi…can anybody show me how to render an Irr Map for a walkthrough using a render farm? What I have done now is to calculate the Irr Map on one pc and shoot the Incremental add to current map to 6 pc’s on the render farm, but I am not really sure if this is how it is done…An emergency please, so an early response would be great and highly appreciated! Thanks in advance!
its always best to calculate the irradiance map on one machine. Then send the actual animation to your renderfarm loading the saved irradiance map.
why not just use DR? you can calculate irradiance maps with DR for flythroughs. i do it all the time
and if something goes wrong with one machine during that DR process, its likely his irradiance map will be bad. No Id recommend the safe way, use one machine.
Have u tried to send a DR IM calculation to backburner? Or this process should always be done locally?
backburner isnt involved with DR
Also, AFAIK, incremental add doesn’t work over DR. I’ve found that on my small farm (4 machines) it’s much faster to use the incremental add on one machine than to recalculate each frame over DR. This may have changes in 1.5 though, I’m not sure.
Start with no IRmap, set it to multiframe incremental and the rest of those settings and render it on only one machine, then let the ani pick up that IRmap file and youre sorted.
strange. i did a flyby animation on an island recently and the irradiance map was calculated on my farm of 6 systems. this was with a 1.49.x version though. so maybe vlado disabled it when he went 1.5
Its never worked for us, going back to 1.47 - after each frame is saved from a new node it overwrites the other ones instead of merging them together before saving.
just fired up my BOXX and turned on the spawner and threw the current project im doing at it and had no problems
Ahh, sorry, I was talking backburner. 
Not used DR yet.
oh. backburner. well on that i have no idea. never tried it like that
never tried to calculate GI solutions, but when testing a small animation some slaves droped the render once and a while… :?
What im talking about is exactly that: using backburner to manage several DR IM calculations with incremental ADD to current map. I dont like the idea of having my local workstation locked because of a DR. This is the work rendernodes should do.
AFAIK, vray 1.5 can render incremental IM too, but my farm is too busy to try and calculate a DR Im test, mainly because DR doesnt care about if a rendernode is rendering some backburner tasks or not; it will send the part of DR to that machine and therefore will make it crash if that machine is already working on some other scenes.
You can use my script http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8881&highlight=imap+control to send a job as 50’s or whatever to backburner to render and save separate imaps then merge them together. Wrote a script to merge them too. Haven’t tried them with RC2 though. might still work.
oh and the links on my site are broke but the ones in the thread work.
what you need is a DR central control panel which shows you which DR nodes are engaged and which are not, and it will also allow you to add or subtract nodes from the calculation while its in progress. this used to be possible back in the early 1.9x days but in order to get the DR more stable it was removed. I remember the days when DR was 1st introduced and me and egz were testing it via use of IP addresses and were DRing our computers across the atlantic
That’s pretty cool. Renderutopia.
well the faster the internet gets the more possible things like that are. i was on cable internet. not sure what he was on but i remember he said he was using his laptop wireless in his backyard or something. it was just a simple sphere or something like that (maybe a teapot was involved in the whole affair lol)
Actually I’m glad you posted about the imap control script. We can’t get it to work with RC2. You click the button and it immediately gives an error 'Vray not loaded. Please make vray the current renderer.