Calculating the irradiance map and light cache on a network for animation

[Eezo]

I'm doing my first animation for a very long time and I need to render my project on a cloud based render farm to get it done in time.

 

My question is this, can I render and irradiance map and light cache for an animation on a network or does this have to be done on the one machine?

 

Thanks

[Eezo]

OK I think I've answered my own question, I'm fairly sure this can't be done. So my new question is this, how can I render a vray animation of an external scene with just a moving camera on a network without flickering and not using an irradiance map rendered on the one machine.

 

I have a 2500 frame animation to do and it will take way to long to do that on the one machine and my deadline is getting very close, any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Camby1298]

You dont need to calculate Irradiance for every frame when you dont have moving objects. Depending on how fast your camera is moving, you can get away with rendering every other 20 frames or so.

[Eezo]

Hi Brian

 

I'm currently rendering every 10 frames so I'll so if I can get away with 20 but still not sure it will be enough. I've read somewhere you can calculate the irradiance map at half size and then use it for a larger sized render afterwards. Any truth in that at all?

[RyderSK]

Hi Brian

 

I'm currently rendering every 10 frames so I'll so if I can get away with 20 but still not sure it will be enough. I've read somewhere you can calculate the irradiance map at half size and then use it for a larger sized render afterwards. Any truth in that at all?

 

It's sound. You will obviously loose plenty of detail, even moreso if you're using fast interpolated IR for animation, but you'll shave off some time. With that said, are you using good settings ? IR is usually the least thing that would take long for anims, esp. when you only compute it per each few frames.

 

The fraction IR is usually done when rendering to high resolution, ie. 4k+, when the additional GI detail just won't be necessary or visible at all, but you still need sharp texture detail and AA for those crisp prints.

[Eezo]

OK I'm now rendering every 15 frames but I'm still getting roughly 12 minutes to render each Frame for IR. That still seems like a long time to me, does that sound like a long time for something like this?