Imap Control alows you to save a series of Irradiance maps per frame with V-Ray® and then allows you to reuse those maps per frame, It also is useful to save incremental maps when creating Incremental add maps, saving progress incase of a crash. To install download the file, drag it to the MAX viewport and follow the instructions (make sure when you download that the extension is still “mzp”
wow pretty cool. will be trying it out. any way to take an single irradiance map created from say 200 frames and re output them to single frame irradiance maps?
I have updated the script to work with backburner, also fixed a problem with the installer (sorry for any inconvenience) . It is now possible to send a series of frames to the farm to calc. the Irradiance Maps and then scrub to any of the frames and automaticly render it localy with the saved map
Hi Eric, im having trouble loading your script. I have made a button for it, but everytime I click on the button nothing appears! I have tried it in max 5,6 and 7 and no luck!
VRay needs to be assigned as the current renderer, there is supposed to be a warning to tell you that but I REM’d it out for some testing and forgot to turn it back on.
nice script. i wished, i could use maxscript allready.
well
i am not sure, in what situations is it nessesair to use i-maps that where saved frame by frame. Dont you usualy render such animaitons in one step ? when i render animations in single frame isnt usual to render the final image in one step. ?
the advantage to creating imaps by frame is same advantage to saving animations by frame instead of one movie file. If something gets jacked up during the process, you dont have to completely start over. obviously theres other advantages as well, but this is the big one for me.
Tricky, once you’ve dropped it into the viewport a dialogue box will appear informing you that you need to reboot max to complete installation. Then just create a button for it and you’ve finished.
RErender - I just used this script to do a fly thru of an interior with a moving object. Worked great but as I was using photons for the 2nd bounce it would have been good if I could have saved individual photon maps for each frame as well. Just a thought…
Looks like a nice little script Rerender, although we haven’t moved up to 1.45+ yet…
I was wondering if it is possible to alter this script, or create a new one, that allows you to add the irradiance from one frame to a saved irradiance map?
The idea would be to allow you to calculate the irradiance map for the static objects in a scene and save this map. Then you could add to this map the irradiance map for the moving objects. Does that make sense??
Kind of like what you can do by hiding a moving object in a scene, render out the scene, unhide object, make sure you have “incremental add to current map” set then render again. But the difference would be that then you revert back to the original Imap. I know it doesn’t give a real solution but it seems like a decent compromise. See http://www.core3d.com/ben/render\_tests/gitest.html for an example of what I mean.
Yes zapcat, and thanks, that’s fine for renders where nothing is moving in the scene.
However, I believe an “add to target map” (or whatever you want to call it) would be useful for animating small amounts of geometry in complex scenes. I see this working in two phases:
1. Firstly you would do a pass where you calculate irradiance map for the “background” (or static geometry) for the whole sequence using “incremental add to current map”. The moving geometry would need to be hidden for this pass. It would be a one off pass and irradiance map would be saved.
2. The next step would be carried out at render time, for each and every frame. This would be to calculate the irradiance map for the moving objects (unhidden) and add it to the saved irradiance map created in the first pass.
For complex scenes with minimal animation of geometry this would be a dream as the irradiance map for the entire scene would not need to be calculated at every frame, just the addition of the moving parts. Therefore the render times would be considerably quicker. The background would have GI and the moving objects would have GI there just wouldn’t be as much GI interaction between them as there would be if you rendered the whole GI for a scene.
If only you could force network renders to revert to a saved irradiance map before each render, then use “incremental add to current map” to make the additions. Would be the best I think??
Tom - Another use is to render imaps in backburner on several machines at the same time to be merged with imapviewer, instead of having to send the whole job to one machine with incremental add.
Zapcat - there is not direct script access to saving photon maps, I believe though that if you check “convert to irradiance map” the info will be saved with the imap (not sure if that is true, but Vlado did say that lightmaps work that way).
Ben - Nice technique, should be pretty easy to implement. I’ll see what I can do.
