irmap shortcut ?

[pg1]

I have an animation setup using a multi frame incremental irmap and using backburner have setup the render to go through as a denpendent so the render will only start after the irmap is complete which I have done plenty o times with no bother.

 

My question is as my irmap is only rendering every tenth frame can I set the animation to render on a different machine using the frames already calculated while the irmap is still calculating.

 

In other words can I start to use the information in an Irmap to begin a render before the irmap is complete or do you have to waiting for the irmap to finish before you can start the render.

[Craig Ramsay]

Short answer is you need to wait for the IR map calculation to finish before you render out your frames.

[pg1]

and the long answer?

 

I have copied the irmap when it was half way through its calculation to a different location and started rendering frames and it looks fine.

Are the frames I have rendered from half completed irmap going to be identical to the frames from the completed irmap?

 

I am guessing that as the machine calculating the irmap needs to write out the information as it finishes each irmap frame that if you were to start rendering from it that you would eventually run into a conflict where both computers would be trying to access the file at the same time.

 

Is that the only reason or is there information thats added to the entire map after the map reaches its last frame?

[Craig Ramsay]

If you are using multiframe incremental then information is added every nth frame to the map. So basically, depending on your scene, if the entire map hasn't finished calculating when you start to render frames, you may get dark patches where the lighting information has not been calculated yet.

 

Hope that makes sense.

[pg1]

Hey Craig

 

thx for you help

 

That makes perfect sense.

What I'm getting at is we have machines here sitting idle waiting on 1 machine to complete the irmap.

 

As long those machines dont render a frame beyond what has been worked out in the irmap can the rendering machines access the irmap while it is still being calculated or will there be a conflict?

 

For example the irmap has worked out 1000 frames from a 3000 frame animation can I set other machines to work rendering frames 0-1000 using that irmap while frames 1000-3000 are still writing to the same map?

[Craig Ramsay]

For example the irmap has worked out 1000 frames from a 3000 frame animation can I set other machines to work rendering frames 0-1000 using that irmap while frames 1000-3000 are still writing to the same map?

 

In theory yes that should work but I’m not going to give you any guarantees as I have never actually tried it. Only one way to find out I guess