Good news!

Actually, this is because Adaptive (BSD) can work in various modes, say photon mapping, final gathering, ambient occlusion or a combination of them.

Best wishes

hi,
i had a very little exeprience with Vray a couple of years ago,
but i remember that what i liked the most was the first couple of seconds, when the whole image cleared out (like an animated noise, or just like the preview IR), and then render engine started the irridiance calculation.
i think this is because vray can combine two different render engines, a kinda undiased (like IR in thea) and a biased engine in the end. maybe a more experienced user can describe better what's going on at the early stage of vray's computations.
this techinque has the advantage of a fast preview in the first seconds of calculations.

does the improvements has to do with a similar approach?
or to re-phrase the question, is there a way to use the calculations of the Interactive preview which are ultra-fast (and thank you for this extremely usefull feature) as a first -and pretty damn accurate-step, that is, use the render engine of the IR (allowing the user to select the passes in the render settings as well), as a guide for the FG samples?

regards,
george

This is great news as so many people do use BSD including me.

My one request would be to let the BSD render output 32bit per channel or 96bit HDRIs.

I thought it could already render out to 32bit per channel, just need to turn off clamp radiance ??

96 bit HDRIs, I haven't seen these any links ?


cheers

Terminology can be a bit confusing with HDR. About HDR encoding standards, dynamic range and stored image quality, reading trough this paper of Greg Ward (the developer of Radiance) is a good start.
http://www.anyhere.com/gward/hdrenc/hdr_encodings.html

Thanks Pentti, I had a look and didn't find any info on 96 bit HDRI's ?

Probably the referred "96 bit" is just ordinary 32 bits per color space.

Hi Javadevil. The clamp thing does help when saved as a .hdr. I think the problem I was having was saving as a .tiff. For some reason I thought a tr1 render saved a 32 bit .tiff and bsd saved a 8 bit .tiff. Now I test it and realize I have to save as a .hdr to get a 32 bit image saved.

Can't say I can give a link to somewhere that explains the bit thing very well as I remember when I researched it the info on HDRI was pretty terrible. When talking about HDRI with increased bit depth there are two kinds. 16 bit per RGB channel and 32 bit per RGB channel.
16 bit x 3 channels, Red, Green, and Blue = 48bit HDRI
32 bit per channel x 3 channels = 96bit HDRI
It's another way of expressing it.
This should also not be confused with what some call HDRI photography where they take different pictures at different exposures so they can mix them together to get a surreal look to them in an 8 bit per channel image and is talked about in the next link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging

8 bit per channel also known as a 24 bit image is more colors then the human eye can see. This makes HDRI really only needed in 3D or doing photo/video editing.

I understand High Dynamic range, Linear Colour space, Gamma, etc.. I have been using it for years, its the 96bit HDRI's I haven't heard of. I thought it was something new, but I realise now your calling 32bit HDRI's 96bit.

cheers