lacilaci wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2019 1:16 pm
1. What will happen if I try to render through reflection ? I actually did render like that in past to get a bit of spherical distortion using corona and you bet people will be doing stuff like that
The estimated radius will not account for the deformation. In a scene like this, the estimated radius will not account for the lens magnification:
So it will not be totally off but also not so accurate in this case.
lacilaci wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2019 1:16 pm
2. What are those ray differentials - is this the ability to differentiate between glossy, specular, diffuse... rays?
It is annoying to write because it has a cost and requires to add code to any camera and material type. However it is also very useful because it can be used for stuff like picking the LoD of an object, selecting the mip map level of a texture map (kept on disk and cached), etc.. The latter is a pretty mandatory feature for very high productions where you can have many terabytes of very high resolution texture maps.
Support LuxCoreRender project with salts and bounties
It seems to be working fine in every testscene I tried. But it seems there is some issue and even with lot of photons I get large dark/black areas.
I don't know if it's some material or maybe carpets, but the scene has a lot of openings so it shouldn't be so hard to cover the scene with cache.
simplified version of the scene doesn't show the issue, so I'll try to find out what is killing the photons...
lacilaci wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2019 3:57 pm
It seems to be working fine in every testscene I tried. But it seems there is some issue and even with lot of photons I get large dark/black areas.
However, If there is something, it can not bet related to the auto-radius (as it affects only the the radius size). You should get the same result if you specified the radius by hand or use the auto-radius.
Support LuxCoreRender project with salts and bounties
lacilaci wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2019 3:57 pm
It seems to be working fine in every testscene I tried. But it seems there is some issue and even with lot of photons I get large dark/black areas.
However, If there is something, it can not bet related to the auto-radius (as it affects only the the radius size). You should get the same result if you specified the radius by hand or use the auto-radius.
Yes I don't think it's related to that. This scene is giving me issues all the time with photongi but I have to dissassemble it piece by piece to figure out what's killing the performance there...
Can we have ULLONG_MAX integer limit upgrade for caustic photons tracing, but we keep the U_int for storing?
Or option for tracing passes, trace 4294967295 and store 300000, then trace 2'th time and store and so on.
The tracing goes pretty fast with small depth, but the hit ratio is very low.
lacilaci wrote: ↑Sun Mar 10, 2019 6:13 am
This needs to get fixed otherwise we cannot create materials like monitor displays or small lightsources without killing photonGI.
That kind of "black poison" is usually due to NaNs. It must be something specific of the scene because it usually doesn't happen, can you post a test scene ?
Anyway, I'm going to add a anti-NaNs safety net so the poison will not be possible anymore.
Support LuxCoreRender project with salts and bounties
lacilaci wrote: ↑Sun Mar 10, 2019 6:13 am
This needs to get fixed otherwise we cannot create materials like monitor displays or small lightsources without killing photonGI.
That kind of "black poison" is usually due to NaNs. It must be something specific of the scene because it usually doesn't happen, can you post a test scene ?
Anyway, I'm going to add a anti-NaNs safety net so the poison will not be possible anymore.
I can't now cause I'm on a photoshoot. I can post the scene tomorrrow.
But the cause is definitely emission on material as you can see in the screenshots, where it only happens with emission plugged in.
? I actually did render like that in past to get a bit of spherical distortion using corona and you bet people will be doing stuff like that 
