anyone know if you create an irradiance map with edge enhancement, can you then turn it off for the render? Will it cause any problems?
edge enhancement? OR Detail Enhancement?
oops yeah i meant detail enhancement.
detail enhanement is basically a hybrid lighting calculation which adds QMC GI to IRmap calcs.
As far as I know its only produced at render time.
So if you turn it off it wont cause any problems. It will just look slightly different and it should render faster
yeah… detail enhancement happens at render time. So what this means is that you can lower the IRmap settings and go get your detail at render time. None of the detail enhancement is being calculated during the IRmap phase, so it is pointless to use it at that time.
Re: turn off edge enhancement
Yep, it will cause problems. The irradiance maps calculated with detail enhancement and without it are quite different. If you have calculated the map with detail enhancement “on”, it will contain “blank” areas to be filled with detail during the actual rendering. If you turn off DE for the final rendering, this will look very weird.
Best regards,
Vlado
Re: turn off edge enhancement
thank you, thats what I suspected. I noticed that the irradiance map seemed to take longer with it turned on. But the rendertime itself just became too unmanageable, for an animation at full HD. So I decided to turn it off.
percy, if you need the extra detail you can do an AO pass and comp it in
thank you, I know all about vray dirt, I was using it before it was publically released. I also knew what detail enhancement was, just needed to know if it was turned on for an irradiance map, whether you were locked into using it for the render or if a new irrad map would be necessary.
Judging from the responses, Im going to assume nobody else knew the correct answer either, other then vlado. 
i never doubted you percy 
Also keep in mind that Dirt/AO has no lighting information… just darkening. Detail enhancement actually has lighting/GI info.
yes thats one of the problems I have with vray dirt. In certain situations, I have to screen in a local light pass, after multiplying in the dirt, as it basically removed light in corners ans such. Sometimes I just dont want a crapload of passes…lol lazy…
As a person that used renderman for years… I know what you mean. I habitually render a lot of passes then after, I wonder why… with Vray this is need for little more than the beauty pass.
Is it ok to turn on detailed enhancement after rendering an irmap without it?
Granted.. this is a guess… but I would say yes, very much so.
Nope. Like I said in my previous post, irradiance maps computed with and without DE are different. When you render, the DE option *must* be the same as when the irradiance map was computed. Otherwise you will get a wrong result.
Best regards,
Vlado
could you elaborate on what you would call a ‘wrong’ result? artifacts and such?
To risk a wrong answer in this thread again, I guess the error would be multiplication of the darks. 
Re: turn off edge enhancement
Re: turn off edge enhancement
haha touche. I guess though, its not nearly that obvious. On the project, where I calced the irrad map with DE turned on, then rendered final without it, I couldn’t really find anything obviously wrong. Of course these were just stills, maybe its more obvious for animations. I rendered a separate dirt pass map along with a lighting pass for it anyways, so maybe not a big deal.