[Radiance-general] out of memory in avstore

[Greg Ward]

Hi Casper et al.,

I need a little more information about the material on the inside of  
the light pipes.  Is it diffuse?  If not, then you probably don't  
need all the ambient bounces.  Even if it is, Jack's idea for using  
mkillum is a good one.  I'd try putting the illum surface on the  
interior portal first, and set mkillum -aa 0 so there's no ambient  
storage, decreasing other parameters to mkillum accordingly, e.g.:

	mkillum -ab 0 -ad 256 -as 0 -ab 4

This will perform a pure Monte Carlo calculation in mkillum, which  
will avoid the storage problem and still give you reasonable results.

As Jack points out, light pipes are not really Radiance's forte, and  
down the line there will be better options, like using rtcontrib in a  
more general ray-tracing precalculation.  Right now, you're sort of  
stuck with mkillum.  If your interior surfaces are mirror-like, then  
you may also avail yourself of the "mirror" type to handle redirected  
sunlight, but only if you expect that.

Best,
-Greg

> From: Rob Guglielmetti <rpg at rumblestrip.org>
> Date: May 13, 2008 8:52:38 AM PDT
>
> Jack de Valpine wrote:
>> .... Perhaps to optimize things further you could then place  
>> polygons to close the bottom end of the pipes and again run  
>> mkillum on these resulting in light distribution that is  
>> effectively at the bottom of the pipe. I am not sure how valid  
>> this is so perhaps others can chime in.
>
> Oooh, I hadn't thought of that before, but of course you're right.   
> A very complex skylight/laylight system with multiple "nasty"  
> layers could be sorted out, via mkillum, one at a time with  
> progressive mkillum runs starting from the outside and working your  
> way in.  Then for the final calcs/renders, you would simply use the  
> last set of illums.  Why wouldn't this be valid?  As long as you  
> only use the last set of illums so there isn't any double- or  
> triple counting of contributions, this seems totally valid to me.   
> Greg?
> - Rob