Storing irradiance map

I’m producing an interior walk through for a client and I’m having trouble with the irradiance map. I’m using vray lights (with store with irradiance map selected) & photons. Everytime I try reusing a saved calculated irradiance map vray recalculates it. I don’t have this problem with exterior renders.

Any ideas on what I may be doing wrong?

Zap

so are you rendering from the saved map ?
are you using Interpolation for any glossy’s , this will force same extra passes.

Yeah I’m rendering from a saved map - it’s half the size of the actual size I want. Right now I’m just doing stills but when it comes to the animation I need to render from a incrementally saved map, other wise it’ll take forever!
I am using interpolation for some smokey/semi-transparent plastic.

Can problem be solved?

there isnt a problem …

render your animation every 15 frame as Incremental add to current map, but start with a new map.

then switch back to render every frame and render from the saved Imap.
the extra passes or not Imap passes they are your Glossy’s doing the interpolation passes. the only way to stop this is to turn this off. !

Fair enough. Pity, but I’ll try another material setting for the plastic.

Thanks for your help Natty.