unified sampling 2012

[Maximus]

well dont want to always repeat myself but judging from the last problem in soft2012 regarding mental ray and posts around seems like no one cares about mental ray anymore, its pretty damn frustrating to have an half implemented and even bad implemented render engine.
Its getting worse with every release.

[Gabba]

I don't know if it's working correctly, but I tried to install the 2011.5 ctrl ghost and IBL seems to work.

[Kzin]

well dont want to always repeat myself but judging from the last problem in soft2012 regarding mental ray and posts around seems like no one cares about mental ray anymore, its pretty damn frustrating to have an half implemented and even bad implemented render engine.
Its getting worse with every release.

the mr integration bugs are in since some versions. it looks like there is no betatester which test the mr integration. the bugs are simple ones which can be found within one minute of every day work. perhaps "we" need some more mr centric betatesters.

I noticed the spec too it was coming from Xsi environment shader. If you used the mib_spherical_lookup it was working.
It is sad we don't have access out of the box to the IBL mode. It's damn good.

That said you can't use really bsdf shader with iradiance particle. You have to connect them into the new bsdf slot in the material shader that is not exposed.

good to know with the xsi env shader. and its interesting to know there is a new bsdf slot. i tested the shader 2 days ago in xsi2012 and could not get the framebuffer to work, this could be the reason (it also does not work in xsi2011). also a problem in xsi, you cant deactivate spec from lights on these shaders, so at the moment there is no way to use them.

but you can built a brute force gi workflow now in xsi with arch_mat.
ibl for envlighting and brute force ip's without env evaluation for all secondary gi.
for framebuffer you have to know that the ibl lighting is in the diffuse framebuffer.
in the irradience you have only the ip/secondary gi, so it gives you more control in post for this.
and because you use ibl for first gi lookup, you can also use refractive properties in your shaders (which is not supported by ip's at the moment).

[Saturn]

Actually the IBL is a direct light, not a GI lookup.
That why it is very stable and thus works with transparent object and ip.

[gustavoeb]

hi guys. I'm trying to figure unified sampling out. first of all one must say the docs let you down. it is promissed to be better then the old sampling but if you only follow the docs by the letter it always seems to be slower and dumber then the old adaptive sampling.
here are some things I have figured out on my own using the new Pixel Time diagnostics to help me out. (by the way, this is a render channel, it took me a while to notice that too)Ç
*First of all whatever adaptiviness calculation Unified is doing, it seems to be doing it before considering the samples in the shaders and lights. Nothing new here, but this seems to slow it down a lot with little gain. I found out that setting all my shaders and lights (reflections, occlusion, area lights, area shadows, eveything) to have only 1 sample is the way for Unified feel more responsive and comprehensive
*Quality is your man when getting rid of noise is the case, and many times it wont go as far as you want from 0-1, but going over one is not necessarily making instantly slower (if you have all the shaders and lights with only 1 sample that is). Quality seems to work on the noisiness of everything in the scene.
*While the noise seems to work with everything in your scene, cuttof seems to work with everything BUT glossy reflections of light sources (that is my impression, dont take my word for it). Which is great, because you dont need all that quality in other areas anyways, so you up the cuttof a little to counterbalance the need for more quality sometimes.

[gustavoeb]

as for the promisse of dealing better with hairs, dof and mb... cant say, havent tested yet.

[Kzin]

as for the promisse of dealing better with hairs, dof and mb... cant say, havent tested yet.

hair renders faster with better quality. its possible now to render ibl and/or area lights with hair without to wait a half day. its not perfect, but you can consider to use it.

and dof and mb is way faster. for mb, its about 4 to 5 times better. mi did a great job here with mb, because its also way faster with normal aa. and you can render now dof and mb togehter without wasting time the other half of the day. ;)