Light cache and number of passes

[branskyj]

Hi all,

my normal setup in VRay is Irradiance Map (primary bounce) and Light cache (secondary bounce). I have 3 PCs- one workstation with 4 cores(no hyper threading) and two render slaves (4 cores each with hyper threading). My question is- what number should I put under "number of passes" in Light Cache roll-out in VRay when I am doing distributed rendering? 4 or 12 ( the second being the sum of all CPUs)

 

I am asking because lately I am experiencing huge delays in calculating the Light Cache due to lots of vegetation (polygons) in my scene.

Thanks all.

[Stephen Thomas]

Light Cache is only calculated on one machine, so in your case it would be 4 passes.

[branskyj]

Thanks a lot, stef.thomas.

[Stephen Thomas]

Also worth checking you have your dynamic memory limit set high enough too, that might account for the slowness. By default it is set to 400Mb, try changing it to at least 4000Mb (depending on how much ram you have) and make sure default geometry is set to 'auto'.

 

Another trick to try is, if you are using opacity maps in your vegetation materials, make sure you turn bitmap filtering to 'none' for these maps (by default it is pyramidal). This can speed things up too.