These sort of glitches could be gfx card related . . I don't have that one either, what I have is when panning around in the Render Tree or in the ICE Tree, sometimes only a region of the tree view actually moves/updates, until I resize the view.

Ah too bad ;) Seeing puzzles already. Thanks for the explanation.

Thanks for the links!

First to solve this gets a free copy of Arnold?

Found that out recently... a good compromise between speed & quality is also using mental ray's internal IBL lighting accelleration (can be enabled with the Ctrl_Ghost_Settings geoshader).
(Tip don't use approximate mode if you want realistic highlights)

generate sound in ICE trees

If it's possible I'd work with a light rig built from the image, and a normal hair shader (internal "Hair_shading" or muh_hair). This will be much faster. Hair+area lights is the slowest it gets. Don't know if it's the shader that causes the artefacts, I've seen something similar when not ...

What is your lighting setup?

I see, thanks for the explanation.
Great compound & videos, too
*if you don't mind I'm going to use that last one as a thumbnail for Glue's entry at rray.de
Ray

Hi gumboyaya, in the FG precomp phase, MR shoots eye rays this is why the dark areas aren't visible in reflections (No FG points generated there). The "Primary visibility" switch won't work - in order to turn off eye ray visibility of the ground plane, you'd first have to have a mip_rayswi...

Thanks, makes a lot of sense to put the caching procedure in a script.

Turned out the 2012 emit mesh compound only works on the first try in 2012 SAP. After dis / reconnecting the in_name port, it showed the same issues. Not so in 2012 (Non SAP)

If you use 2012's emit mesh compound, it works

No idea how to fix it, only can confirm it works for 2012, but that it's broken since 2012SP1.

Thanks. It looks like it would work with hair too. But no "hair-shadow-only" pass, probable need another matte shadow pass to cut out from the hair shadow pass.

Moin, found some different takes on that aleady but none of them so far did quite work for me. The idea is simply to have every material display 100% white unless there's a shadow from the hair (or in my case grass) falling on it. What so far worked best for me is the mia_matteshadow shader that has...

I've got no idea why this happens or how to avoid this on my end -- but it's good to hear that it works