Best Vray GI Render Settings for object floating in space

Hey guys,

I am rendering a realistic object just floating in space.

1 dome light with a HDRI image attached. Multiple vray area lights and a couple of black cards to get the ideal reflections. The object has an object with refraction with high glossiness which i've heard Adaptive subdivision is good for scenes with refraction.

Rendering in linear workflow with 32bit exr. I have GI on but figured Irradiance Map + Light Cache was too accurate since there isn't that much bounce.

Would this be considered an exterior render?

I ended up using brute force to reduce noise and all and it still rendered faster then the IM+LC with adaptive DMC but I would like to know the smartest choices.

I'm not a vray expert, but I think brute force is good for exteriors.
Brute force has a hard time trying resolve indirect lightning inside a interior, ie. sun outside and a small window.
I heard someone saying photon mapping is good for scenes with a lot of transparency, but I never did any test.
And they say(http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150...magesampler.htm)
Adaptive dmc is better for scenes with lots of glossy, dof and complex textures. Adaptive subdivision is better for scenes with medium blurrys.
But adaptive dmc is a little harder to configure.

Adaptive subdivision acts like mental ray adaptive sampling.
And adaptive dmc acts more like mental ray unified sampling.

If the object is just floating in space, why not use the dome light and then IM for secondary bounces with lower subdivs. The dome light should take care of most of it.

And then use the DMC sampler.

Bilgames -

That was initially what I thought after going through Spot3D etc etc. I was under the impression that DMC is good for most stuff and then you switch to Adaptive Subdivision if there is MotionBlur and DOF.

Then I bought a gnomon video and if I remember correctly, the guy said Adaptive Subdivision is much better at handling refraction and caustics...more like like stuff. After that, I got really confused as I compared it with Spot3D notes.

Bitter -

Thanks for the tip. I am trying to really understand how the renderer primary and secondary works and which one to use first.

By saying use the Domelight, does that mean my primary should be brute force...like a simple effective way to deal with the object and then have a low quality IM to clean things up?

I thought Irradiance map was good at primary bounce for speed to quality ratio thus its always used as primary and then you'd have a less accurate one like LC to clean up the light bounces?

Thanks for the information and tips guys btw.

The dome light is a giant area light, that would be the brute force part of the lighting.

Then use the irradiance map to fill in object to object indirect lighting.

If the object is floating in space and you want good automatic lighting with an HDRI, just use the dome light. Would be faster than tuning some sort of GI system to handle it.

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