HDRI issues

[SRL]

I have had VW12.5 for a couple weeks and have been playing around with HDRI and radiosity with varied success. Anyways when using the supplied HDRI backgrounds it seems to take about an hour to render a fairly simple drawing of some office furniture with a 3d polygon for a floor. Transferring the same drawing into a PNG takes hours. The results are good but my question is should it take this long.

Second question I purchased a high quality HDRI 3000 x 1500 resolution and when I try to render using it I get an insufficient memory message. I have 2GB of dual channel over-clocked memory and a Nvida quadro 560 graphics card, Intel core-2 E6400 running on a Nforce680i board ; this does not seem right. Anybody have any ideas

[Mat Caird]

Hi SRL

In the Resource Browser, there is the option to edit the HDRI background. From here, choose Options, then wind down the quality. I find that for interiors, Low Quality produces a better result, since it cast 4 or 5 distinct shadows, more like what happens in reality with multiple light sources. Also, if you use high quality in interanl scenes, the result is often grainy. Apparently this is a shortcoming of HDRI, as it's not really designed for internal scenes. That's all I know.

I have never had much luck with Radiosity - takes too long. But I haven't played with it much either.

Good luck, Mat

[Dave Donley]

Hello SRL:

A 3000 x 1500 HDRI will use about 100 MB of RAM (width x height x 24 / 1024 /1024 MB). We are working to reduce the memory use for these backgrounds; one thing that may help is to set the number of undos to zero while you are trying to render this HDRI, and render right after starting up. Some operations will cause the HDRI to be duplicated into the undo list. Undo will use up your available RAM; things will be most empty right after starting up.

HTH,