My render is taking much longer when I deleted the gilight because that started malfunctioning. Why would this happen? Sometimes Houdini has very erratic behavior.

I don't know how badly the GI light was behaving (bad GI light, bad, bad!!), but if you're doing Global Illumination and/or caustics, it only makes sense it would be slower without it…

rafaels
I don't know how badly the GI light was behaving (bad GI light, bad, bad!!), but if you're doing Global Illumination and/or caustics, it only makes sense it would be slower without it…

Why would that be? I'm only using 2 portals (interior scene). By the way I fixed my problem. This thread here helped a lot. http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=21548 [sidefx.com]

Well, as I understand (and I could be wrong), the GI light is baking the secondary light bounces in a photon map, while if it's not there mantra will have to do all the work. I'm assuming you're using PBR, is that right?

Thanks for the link, I'll give it a read.

Ok thanks! I'm still learning.

And yes it's PBR.