[Radiance-general] sharing the ambient cache

[Greg Ward]

Hi Rob,

Jack de Valpine or John Mardaljevic may know more about this than I  
do, as they have experience using different ambient settings in  
different runs, whereas I tend to stick with the same settings I  
start with.  In general, it's safe to run with reduced ambient  
settings in subsequent renderings when you share an ambient file.   
Specifically, it's OK to relax the -ad and -as settings, and -aa and - 
ar as well.  You can reduce -ab (though -ab 0 won't use the ambient  
file values at all), but I wouldn't recommend changing -av or -aw.   
(There is no speed advantage to doing so, anyway.)

-Greg

> From: Rob Guglielmetti <rpg at rumblestrip.org>
> Date: December 21, 2005 3:14:25 PM PST
>
> Hi folks,
>
> I should know the answer to this, but I don't.  Let's say I have a  
> script that performs some numeric analysis of a scene (rtrace) and  
> then does some renderings as well.  I typically crank up the  
> settings quite a bit for rtrace, but relax them a bit for images  
> (usually).  My question is, can the rpict process(es) safely use  
> the existing ambient cache left over from the high-accuracy rtrace  
> run?  Could running the rtrace at lower accuracy settings degrade  
> any of the previously cached values?  Just curious.
>
> - Rob
>