[Radiance-general] ambient resolution and memory

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi,

I hope these messages will arrive one day when radiance-online.org is 
back again...

I am getting into trouble with rendering a large detailed model. If I am 
setting ar as usually (ar=scene boundary/detail dimensions, I get 
something like -ar 2000. That leads to slow processing with huge memory 
useage (around 1.6 GB).

I wonder if there is a way to reduce the general resolution in such 
cases and increase accuracy in detailed regions only by ad, as and aa.

I also wonder if there is at least some performance to win by changing / 
releasing ambient parameters for high-res pictures after the ouverture 
produced some values. While people did such things for a while, later 
posts suggested that this is not safe. Is this true for ALL ambient 
parameters?

Finally, I am using mkillum to cut one step from the ambient daylight 
calculation, illums are covering all windows. Does this influence the 
simple formula used to calculate ar, or is ar only determined by scene 
geometry?

I am a bit desperate, as the ambient paramters needed to produce clean 
images lead to rendering times about two weeks per 1200x1200 picture at 
the moment here, on a 3.2GHz P4... so I hope to optimize a bit by 
tweaking ambient calculation. I am already using mkillum and ambient 
exclude lists to accelerate things a bit. The scene will become even 
"worse" when I switch on my artificial light sources...

CU Lars.