I haven’t touched the local subdivs in Vray since 2017
Why do you use them?
It is recommended to let Vray figure this out on its own, and it does a very good job on this. This is one big advantage of using Vray honestly, you spend 0 time on optimizing the scene sampling.
I have never came across a case that needed using local subdivs
Local subdivisions have been completely removed, after five years of being greyed out by default, and with their use strongly discouraged by us.
That’s an inferior way to go about rendering, which leads to non-uniform noise, and potentially extreme oversampling, without the chance to make decisions per pixel.
The adaptive algorithms that made their appearance in v3.3 are the only way to render an image with a noise level which is as uniform as possible, and with no oversampling where there is no need for it, thereby greatly reducing render times.
All you need to do now (well, since 3.3) is set a suitably high max AA (say, 100 subdivs) and pick a noise level you like.
The beta forum for v5 is closed, and will soon be archived, that’s why you couldn’t post there.
Haven’t seen one example where using local subdivs is faster than letting Vray do its thing. I spent a lot of time testing this in the past as well(hence why I have been trusting Vray with that for years)
You can control primary vs secondary rays with min shading rate (something I haven’t touched in 2 years.. the default value of 6 has worked very well for all of my scenes)
And using competition products I say that Vray’s sampling is better and more efficient than anything else by a mile.
If you have a scene that shows using local subdivs is faster or even close to letting Vray do this, feel free to share.
It is odd honestly reading this, while Redshift or Arnold folks dream of the sampling that we have in Vray
No, there are a default of six secondary rays per camera ray.
Give or take: the number is automatically varied depending on what is being shaded.
The “secondary rays are quicker than primary” debate is old, and wrongly set up: it only seems to work that way when one has extremely simple scenes.