MOAWiz

Thank you for the update Jérôme...I'm sorry to hear about your tragic family issue.

Thanks for your hard work.

Hi Jérôme,

I also found this bit of information on 3dworldmag. I noticed SR always turns off the secondary GI engine regardless if your using light cache for glossy rays or not.

www.3dworldmag.com/2011/06/13/flicker-fr...ation-using-v-ray/2/

Light cache:

You now have two options depending on your workflow, if you have rendered your animation with use light cache for glossy rays ticked, you will need to leave your light cache as the secondary GI engine.

Keep it in single frame mode and have use camera path ticked.

If you have rendered without use light cache for glossy rays, disable the secondary GI engine leaving only the irradiance map as the primary GI engine.

You can do this because the secondary GI data has been stored in the primary GI engine via the irradiance map prepass.

Hello Jerome,

I'm also sorry to hear about your family tragedy.

I'm having a similar problem rendering an animation with some moving objects on a render farm with about 25 nodes. I use the Full, 2 pass method. During the first pass calculation times are really erratic, for example one frame calculates in about a minute, the next one can take nearly an hour or more. And in the render pass, frames that take 2 minutes to render with Solid Rocks in still mode on my workstation take up to 20 when rendered by more powerful computers on the farm. In your first reply you suggest this:

"On the second pass, the irrmap interp samples can(must?) be lowered cause it handles multiple irradiance maps and cause render to slow down...

I'm working on it.

In waiting, you can use the "save for farm" button on pass2, open the max file, and adjust manually the IM interp samples to gain time."

If I understand correctly, you suggest using the "save for farm" button to save a separate temporary .max file, closing the original file and opening up the temporary one. Then opening up the 3dsMax render dialogue box and manually changing the "interp.samples" value under irradiance map basic parameters? Can you suggest a value to put in here? Does not putting in a lower number increase the quality and thus the time taken to render. And then should you send the job from the 3dsMax dialogue or from Solid Rocks? I'd really appreciate if you could set out a detailed step-by-step workflow.

Thank you.

Thanks for replying so quickly. I understand that there are no universal solutoins, but I appreciate the guidance. I'll run some experiments.