Anybody still using Irradiance Map?

[Chris MacDonald]

Hey chaps,

 

I'm just wondering how many of you still use the irradiance map for stills (Just out of curiosity more than anything). I switched to brute force only about 18 months ago and haven't looked back. The quality, speed and lack of setup is just fantastic.

 

If you haven't switched, what is your reason? Still too slow?

[Scott Schroeder]

I was all Brute Force but switched back to Irradience Map so I can use store with irradience map on the secondary lights in my scene. We had a job that required a lot of renders to be produced in a short time, so I had to look for speed boosts. With going back to IR I've knocked down the render time for 12-16 hours to around 1-2 per scene. And to be perfectly honest, without a noticeable hit in overall quality or noise. There is some noise, but the noise reduction tools in Photoshop's camera raw to an excellent job at removing it. Also, I've adopted the Peter Guthrie Boundary workflow of getting it 95% right in the render and only doing adjustments in Camera Raw + maybe a slight curves adjustment. Without the need to use the reflection passes, which is where most of my extra noise came from in the past, I can use a bit lower render settings and gain a lot more render speed.

 

For personal work, I'd probably still stick with Brute Force but for production work I've switched back to irradience map as it is much faster and more predictable render times.

Edited November 9, 2015 by VelvetElvis

[thomascoote]

I'm still using IR + LC. To be honest the last time I played around using BF the render times were astronomical, but that was before joining a company as a dedicated stills artist, so my workflow has sped up considerably now.

 

Any tips on trying out the switch to BF? Will give it a go on my current project.

[John Dollus]

We only have a couple hours at best for final renders so IR+LC here as well. Brute Force is just too slow and it's already a battle of compromises. Honestly, if we could use brute force, we'd probably go with the Octane engine instead.

[Chris MacDonald]

Any tips on trying out the switch to BF? Will give it a go on my current project.

 

I suppose it depends on how your current workflow is set up. I'm tending to keep all subdivs (lights, materials, everything) at 8 and then use the minimum shading rate to control noise. I rarely need to use more than 8 max antialiasing samples, as opposed to the "universal" workflow of a max of 100, which essentially lets the antialiasing sampler deal with all noise.

[Tommy L]

I suppose it depends on how your current workflow is set up. I'm tending to keep all subdivs (lights, materials, everything) at 8 and then use the minimum shading rate to control noise. I rarely need to use more than 8 max antialiasing samples, as opposed to the "universal" workflow of a max of 100, which essentially lets the antialiasing sampler deal with all noise.

 

Yes, this plays into the idea that there are 3 modes of thinking for sampling.

1: Keep default value for samples, switch sample threshhold to 0 then use min shading rate (Vlado's recommended workflow for 3.2 I think)

2: manually setup all sampling, use global override for switch between draft and finals

3: use min/max = 1/100 then use a DMC algorithm or clr threshold for noise tolerance controlled AA (old school)

 

I use #2 and it works well if you have a good grasp on VRay values. I tried using #1 but was in a rush and my render times climbed. Im sure Ill go back to it once I get around to installing the latest VRay and have some more relaxed project times for testing.

[Dejan Sparovec]

Yep, I usually need many renders in a short time period and I only have my workstation to render them on, so BF is out of the question for me.