Thanks for all the information. I’m glad to see that after so many years this section of the forum still has so much activity from all the old proffesionals.
But about this importon and IP thing. One problem of mine was never resolved in the last thread, which still makes me very hesitant to invest any more time in it until it’s further developed (was gonna wait till 2010 to come back to importons)
first, go to this page http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=621727&page=22&pp=15
then read my posts starting about half way down.
Then read ctrl.studios post at the very bottom.
The issue was basically that, it does not accurately bounce light around corners. In interior scenes this was negligible, as it didn’t have to take into account light from every angle to produce adequate results, but I’m sure it still has issues.
I’m still suspecting that any sort of improvment into contrast or ‘vibrance’ of an image with importons/IP is really due to the fact it’s not taking into account every light bounce and is artifically darkening areas. I mean, final gathering has the ability to be every bit as accurate and detailed as IP/importons, that is if you turn up the settings and wait a bit more time. So it’s not like there is some inherit more ‘vibrant’ component to the ip/importon algorithm, changes in color and contrast is due to it bouncing the light differently. And as I understand, final gathering with very high settings is the current benchmark for accuracy in mental ray, so if importons are coming out different or darker in more areas, more contrasted, it’s not because of more accuracy or improvement over final gathering, it’s because of error, it’s missing bounces.
Or am I completely wrong there?
Admittedly, I have not done new tests since the lasts tests in that old thread. But I’ve seen no mention of any changes to the algorithm in the recent service packs, so I’ve not taken the time to retry it. So I am just curious, has anyone run into anything about this issue? Or looked into it a little more?
