Setting deep sample size for volumes in vray 7.4 / the new volume shader?

V-Ray V-Ray for Houdini General
1

Hi folks!

i’ve got a very very large in distance cloud scape that I’m rendering and I’m getting huge memory overheads when trying to run the deep pass of this in solaris. I’d normally use the deep merge threshold control in max to set how accurate and thus big my deep file is but regardless what I set the value to, whether it’s 1 or 10000, it seems like I still hit the same memory amount on the farm. What’s my best option for reducing the deep quality to make my overheads lower? Or is it more related to the step size of individual cloud volumes that will control this?

I notice the new volume shader (which is very pretty) doesn’t have a step size control either. Are there plans to add this in future?

Cheers!

John

2

Hey,

The setting to control the deep samples can be found in the render settings.

deep
deep914×547 57.4 KB

There is also a “newish” volume step rate that under samples volumes by default (same as Karma’s default), but that can be used to further reduce volume sampling if needed, this mostly likely have no effect in the deep.

volumes
volumes896×558 53.5 KB

3

Thanks David!

I’ve been using that deep merge setting with no difference whether it’s 1 or 10000 so I’m suspicious if it’s something in our hdas at work that isn’t passing that setting over properly. Thanks for the tip on the step setting, will definitely give that a go too and report back!