I DO agree with your technic Ben.
There should be something to compute moving and static objects differently implemented in Vray. This is a very big step in computing science.
I’ve allways thought about it and I supposed It was hard to implement…
I don’t really see how to do that in script language, how to make the difference… except if you point the moving object out.
You can already do that when you use Photon mapping.
For instance, you get the photon map of a static scene, you add the
moving objects next and you compute the animation.
I don’t know in what degree the light should not be good on the moving
objects, but it works without having photon map computed over them.
I haven’t tried it with lightmap, maybe it works too.
This script is great Eric, but the only thing I can’t figure out how when I want to render my final image sequence, do I load the irradiance maps set out at 20 frames apart.
Last night I rendered and saved an irradiance map for every 20th frame. I have a folder full of these now. That bit is okay. It’s the loading of the maps that is the problem for me.
The irradiance maps are all called something like “imap0213.imap” and then “imap0233.imap”, “imap0253.imap” and so on, every 20 frames. - so how do I load the imaps in sequence as I’m rendering out each frame?
Do I put in the first file in to the vray advanced irradiance map parameters box where it says “from file” or do I point to the first map in the sequence using varcht tools? I’m confused
Where or what do I use to tell max to render using all the irradiance maps as the animation goes along?
If you don’t have any moving objects in your scene then it is as easy as merging those imaps into one and loading it in the render dialogue. Use imapviewer to merge the 20th imaps.
when I merge the maps (even just 2) and set it to render it doesn’t work. It all comes out looking incorrect. The irradiance maps do work when I select the individual frames that I had rendered them with…just doesn’t want to work as an animation.
hi rerender, this script turns out to be lifesaver for me…
just one question: when i use your script over backburner only on one machine and with multiframe incremental turned on, it still saves single imaps and not incremental imaps - which i hoped it would do.
is it possible to change that?
another problem occured at rendertime: i use multiframe incremental and after 10 frames it stops saving the imaps but keeps on rendering and saving the images :shock:
I used the 2nd last irradiance file - the last one was corrupt or something, and it seemed to work well! Thanks!
One further question - I noticed some artifacts when I rendered the sequence - like light appearing where it should not. It wasn’t very noticeable, but I imagined that this was happening because there weren’t enough irradiance maps. I rendered every 20 frames which might have been too much?
If I’m going an incremental add to current frame irradiance map, and it’s rendering on 4 separate nodes…will this work? Or do I have to have it save each map for each frame individually and then combine?
Not much I can do about that, I guess I could add the option to delete the previous maps as it goes forward, but I like the redundancy. I have no idea why it would stop saving maps after 10 frames except maybe you are running out of memory?
All our machines are running 1.46.14. I used the imap control script by rerender to save my irradiance maps every 25th frame for a short 250 frame animation I am trying to do. The settings were incremental add to current map, so I ended up with a series of 10 irradiance maps that gradually got bigger.
That sounds okay so far then. However when I went to render my final animation from the irradiance map, it came out lie this!
All black! So i tried using an irradiance map from an earlier frame and the same thing occurred. I used the imap script to load the files, and then I tried just using the vray option to point to an irradiance map to use for the animation, but it also came out black.
I’ve got this working in the past with an earlier version, but it seems to have stopped working now. When I look at the actual irradiance map pass being calculated it looks fine, and I can’t remember what it is I have done that makes the thing come out black in the end.
ok, im a little confused about this script. I selected incremental add. Does that mean I can use the last imap created if the rendering process finishes without any crashes? The only time I should need to merge is if there was a crash?
That will only work if you render to one machine, then if it crashes you can start were it left off and then merge the two pieces. It will still save irrmap files per frame just with each consecutive one being larger containing all the irrmap data.
I highly recommend saving single frame files per frame and then merging them together.
I can’t seem to get the scripts to merge my imaps together. The Imap Merger script installs and runs ok but when I go to merge some imaps together it doesn’t save anything out and I don’t get an error message or anything.
If so I have not tested it for years, I had started updating it to use the vray install folder but they keep moving. If you have moved it to the root and it does not work let me know and I’ll look into it.
