Final Gather Map Rendering/Net Rendering

[adamdabrowski1]

Hey,

 

I've been wondering if there is a way to net render a final gather map so I can send it to the render farm at uni and continue working on my computer. I've been told by my tutors that you can't render a final gather map on the render farm but I find it hard to believe that Autodesk haven't explored this feature at all. Can someone help?

 

Also if I can't do the above, will caching the final gather map locally at a quarter of the resolution of my final render affect the shadows in my renders?

 

I need to sort this out because I have about 200+ frames in the scenes I need to render and they are taking too long to render. I need to cut the render time down quite a bit.

[Justin Hunt]

You can generate the FGM over the farm, BUT depending on how you calculate it there maybe differences between each of the machines. This is due to the "random" nature the FG samples are generated and may cause flickering in the final animation.

 

Now having said that, the flickering may not be noticeable to worry about.

 

There are two basic methods of calculating FG, (1) Old school every n'th frame or (2) new school from points along the camera path.

 

Method 1 makes it easy to use the farm

Method 2 calculates the FG for the whole animation in one go on one machine (I think DBR will work for this)

 

So, yes you can, its not recommended so test it first.

 

jhv

[adamdabrowski1]

You can generate the FGM over the farm, BUT depending on how you calculate it there maybe differences between each of the machines. This is due to the "random" nature the FG samples are generated and may cause flickering in the final animation.

 

Now having said that, the flickering may not be noticeable to worry about.

 

There are two basic methods of calculating FG, (1) Old school every n'th frame or (2) new school from points along the camera path.

 

Method 1 makes it easy to use the farm

Method 2 calculates the FG for the whole animation in one go on one machine (I think DBR will work for this)

 

So, yes you can, its not recommended so test it first.

 

jhv

 

Ok I'll test it out and see how it goes. Have you ever worked with calculating the FG map at a lower res and rendering the rest of the animation at a higher resolution (maybe 4 times the size of the FG map)?

[Justin Hunt]

Its great as more of a colour/light wash which is nice and soft. To get detail into the lighting you have to crank up the settings a bit. In the end I kept a resolution 1:1 to the final. In other situations I found 2:1 (twice the final resolution) with lower settings calculated and rendered quicker with good detail.

 

If detail is really important then use photons and FG.

 

jhv

[adamdabrowski1]

Its great as more of a colour/light wash which is nice and soft. To get detail into the lighting you have to crank up the settings a bit. In the end I kept a resolution 1:1 to the final. In other situations I found 2:1 (twice the final resolution) with lower settings calculated and rendered quicker with good detail.

 

If detail is really important then use photons and FG.

 

jhv

 

My problem is that I have a daylight system with mr sky portals for my internal scene and it looks great. However I have really high rendering times (3 hours per frame) and because of this my renders are being cancelled by the admin for taking too long. detail in the lighting is fairly important as it is a close up shot in my scene. I'll try rendering the final gather map at low res and final render at high res for one frame and see how it looks. If it's ok then I'll render them all like that.

 

Thanks for your help