Reusing a final gather map in animations, with moving objects

[daddyo]

I know how to create a good final gather map and freeze it for animations, but this only works for camera moves. Can you call a different FG map on each frame, once the animation is locked in, so that you don't have to calculate FG rays over and over as you do shading tweaks... Might seem a strange thing to do, but it would be nice to have that over a whole frame range, when you are doing tweaks to other aspects and having to re-render...

Also, what's a good way to break the FG lighting contributions into passes?

[peengoh]

I don´t quite undestand what use would you give to that, Im guessing you are freezing the map to avoid noise and flicker. I would either make a different pass for the background and the moving elements or "characters" or make a FG map every N frames with the moving objects. you could also test working with importons and Irradiance particles.

[daddyo]

I don´t quite undestand what use would you give to that, Im guessing you are freezing the map to avoid noise and flicker. I would either make a different pass for the background and the moving elements or "characters" or make a FG map every N frames with the moving objects. you could also test working with importons and Irradiance particles.

The idea would be to not have to recalculate the rays while making tweaks. Also, rendering on the farm would be much faster.

I haven't tried importons yet, I'm going to look into those.