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This is the beginning, middle and end of a shot that I'm trying to animate with Kray render. It's very simple, a camera pan, a car moving
across screen, car has shadow casting on to the floor and also a reflection.

So I need to lock down the GI for the room so as to not get flickering, I'm happy with render times of around 10 minutes a frame.

Does anyone have any ideas on how best to approach this kind of shot.

Should I use a shared GI for the room and render it separately and then do a separate render for the car, and then some kind of shadow pass.

And what about the reflection of the car in the floor?

I really wanted to just render it all in one but my tests have always given me some flickering.

Also, I noticed in the Kray Surface option plugin there is a cache irradiance, does this mean you can assign a cached GI solution to a surface so that it wont flicker? Just asking.

There is no shadowcatcher for kray unfortunately. Maybe kray 2.3 has a shader that can be applied to an object to enable it.

Well I know it's not really a solution, but you can always render shadows/reflexions with LW render buffer (no GI/refractions/ect in order to have quick renders) and then composite them?

HappyMantis wrote:Well I know it's not really a solution, but you can always render shadows/reflexions with LW render buffer (no GI/refractions/ect in order to have quick renders) and then composite them?

Problem is lights in lw don't look 100% the same when rendered in kray. You would be tweaking light settings.
Kray surface shader to use for shadowcatcher would be great.

Thanks, it sounds like there is no tried and true method. I will probably set up a shadow catching scene using just LW render, I'm currently rendering a test with photon mapping, the examples shown were light mapping, it shouldn't matter either way but I think photon mapping is faster (the look is totally different).
Anyway, the GI is locked down and I'm using the 'update' setting for the cache, this does leave a trail of artifacts in the wake of the moving car object but in this scene it's not that noticeable.

I can also render out a background without the car and use it to clean up the artifact trail when I comp it all together.

Note to Kray developers, if you can get full animation and non flicker GI solution for Kray you will really have something to shout about.

But does anyone have an answer to the Kray surface setting, cache irradiance option question?

Yes the "cache irradiance" in KraySurfaceOptions does what it says: it turns caching for FG on and off. Note though that photons will still be cached. You can try this approach and set caching off for floor surface, perhaps it will work well in your case.

So I would apply the Kray surface option to all the surfaces and then turn it off for the floor surface? Is that what you meant?

And I presume these all cache to the main cache directory that you set up in the Kray Options, correct? Meaning that if you reset the GI cache it will globally reset all surfaces that had the Kray surface option applied.

djwaterman wrote:So I would apply the Kray surface option to all the surfaces and then turn it off for the floor surface? Is that what you meant?

And I presume these all cache to the main cache directory that you set up in the Kray Options, correct? Meaning that if you reset the GI cache it will globally reset all surfaces that had the Kray surface option applied.

No, just apply it to the floor surface and turn cache irradiance OFF. And yes they all cache to the file you specify in general tab.

Thanks, that's even better.