I threw together a little script to automate the merging of Imaps with the Imapviewer. Usage is pretty straightforward. It does require that the latest version imapviewer.exe be located in your Max root and Max 6 or Higher. To install make sure the file extension is still .mzp after download and drag to the Max viewport, after install the script will be available under " customize-Varcht Tools- Imap Merger" as a button. Let me know if you have any problems.
Imapviewer is available on the V-Ray download “documents” area, it is not dependent on Max version, Just My script is. If there was enough demand I could make it work with 5…
I’ve just tried to combine the single frame irradiance maps that I created last night, and when I load them vray gives me a “file format error” message, and the render comes out all black. I’ve no idea what I did wrong and how to fix it. Any clues?
Last night I sent a 1500 frame animation to render out across 4 machines, to compute irradiance maps every 20th frame, and saving each irradiance map separately. These were then to be merged in to one irradiance map at the end.
I’ve tried this and it isn’t working no matter what way I try it. I try to render it locally and it makes no difference. What I’m now wondering is, if you are to render out a sequence of irradiance maps for every 20 frames, not incremental (becuase I’m using up to 6 computers to render it with) do you have to do it every single frame for the merging to work?
When I merge the maps, and render they come out black. If I just use a single irradiance map and render out the frame it corresponds to it looks fine.
What is the best way to do this? We have 6 render nodes with 4 cpus in each, and if I want to make an irradiance map using all the available processing power, what do I set it to? I figured that if you used incremental add to current frame it had to be on the one machine, which is why I tried just rendering the irradiance maps as single frames to then merge. I don’t know what I’ve done wrong
now, your script is really cool! Would be even cooler, if the merge of the maps could be sent to backburner as a job aswell, so, as soon as all the GI-files finished to render, one of the slaves would merge them and as soon, as he finished that, all the clients would start the actual rendering of the image…
Would save some "get-up"s in the night
The thing seems to be working but it zaps through the whole thing really fast (unlike the imapviewer which takes forever to merge large maps) and it creates a file that is only 1kb large.
Are any of the imaps being merged very small in file size? Sometimes empty imaps can cause an error. Also sometimes I have ran into an imap that for whatever reason is corrupt. You can try merging a couple at a time to see if they work until you hit the bad one.
Sucks you are having so much trouble the process usually works.
Old thread I know - I’m trying to get this script to work with Max 2011. Am I doing something wrong or does this need recompiled for the latest version? Are there any other tools available to assist with the automation of merging multiple irmap files?
