photon bouncing

[antimatter]

Is there a way to control the number of bounces for photons? It seems the dark side of my room (window and patio door on far side/focus of camera) isn't getting enough light realistically. I don't have any interior lights yet, as I'm experimenting with getting the exterior lighting as realistic as possible first.
All of the surfaces in this shot are using an arch + design white matte material.

http://schnellweb.ca/files/dstest2.jpg
This is with fg 0.3, 100, 80 bounces = 5
trace depth = 7,5,5
gi = 400, 8'
light properties = 600000 avg GI photons/light, decay = 1.3

[leha_sokol]

there is a photon trace depth setting (i dont know how its called in Max)...you have separate control for reflection and refraction bounces..:)

[antimatter]

that definitely helps.
Now my photon issue is with some target spot lights (not MR lights) that give me "shot 10000 photons, storing none" in the scene. Using "automatically calculate GI and photons".

[leha_sokol]

This can happen because of several reasons:
1. Your lights are shooting photons to areas where there is no geometry storing them.
2. Your material shaders dont have photons shaders attached to them.

Try to leave 1 light and setup it properly...then go for others

[antimatter]

I figured it out from the MR manual of all things...I had my light behind a "light bulb" surface. Even though this surface had invisible backfaces, it was too close to the light and absorbed all the photons. This causes errors. I moved the light just to the other side, and voila!