Hi everyone, well the title explains the thing …
where did the view dependant photon map generation disappeared in v10 ?!!
was it replaced by something else, or should it be added explicitly … or what…
i did a simple test by saving a scene in 9.5 with the render engine set to view-dependant …
and when i open it in 10 it shows up normally as in the 9.5 but it gives a render error when i try to render it

and if i try to obtain the same result with photon map generatino instead of view dependant it says ‘Computing energy from 0 lights for 100000 photons’
so it doesn't work, while in 9.5 this same one works well (in fact i don't have lights in my scene, but object with constant color that i'm using as light emitter)

Thanks for your answer

Best Regards

Yes, view-dependent photon maps have been removed in H10. The reason for the removal is that view-dependent maps were very prone to artifacts and shouldn't be that much slower than running the full path trace. In H10 you should just set up your ROP to just run extra diffuse bounces in a single pass rather than generating a photon map.

Andrew

yep it's gone, u'll have to use Photon map generation instead, it should work well if you use a h10 mantra node, plus make sure you have a large ground plane or something in your scene, it seems to help with photon map generation speeds

jason

EDIT: yes do what Andrew says, i posted at the same time…

Hey , thanks for your answers, i'll try and do some tests with what you suggested, and will be back to you with more questions if any.
Thanks again,

Best Regards

hey , so here I am again
i did some fast tests and the results are good so far.
but here i have a few questions :
- this was the equivalent of mental ray's FG + render pass, so we lost that ability ? and it's important to mention that FG in MR is widely used and very stable, so why did they decide to take it off and not fixing it.
- can you please clarify a bit for me the irradiance cache thing ? and with what it is used ?

Best Regards

Something similar to view-dependent photon maps is planned for a future version, without the pitfalls of the old approach. Irradiance caches are used with the VEX Global Illumination light for ambient occlusion, they are not available for PBR.

Andrew

Thanks for your answers andrewc
so now it is not possible to use raytracing or micropoly for GI ? unless i have a light emitting photons in my scene, or i use the vex GI, or the irradiance vex node ? coz before it was possible to just emit the photons with the view dependant then render with micro or RT to get the desired effect.
and when you said irradiance cache was for vex GI when doing AO, did you mean it's only usefull for AO ? or when only using the vex GI with whatever option like AO, full irradiance … etc. and does it have an influence if you have an iiradiance node in your material ?


EDIT : i did some more tests on the view dependant thingy, and well … from the tests i've done i always obtained a cleaner result with the view dependant.
always the view dependant is closer to the path tracing than the normal photon generation so …

Regards