Hello,

I am playing around with reflections, indirect lighting, and area lights, and im a little confused by how the samples stack up. Ive tried using the help pages, and playing around with the settings doing test renders, but my 3ghz core 2 duo can only render so fast (aka NOT very fast lol).

I understand the lighting and reflection samples themselves, its when you add in stuff like pixel samples and min ray samples that I start to get confused. The pixel samples I think I understand, its mostly the min ray samples I don't get. So, basically I was wondering how the samples combine with each other.

From what I understand, min ray samples is either literally the minimum number of original samples or it is a multiplier for the original samples, and then the pixel samples then take that result and resample it by the pixel sample value.

for example
say area light samples was set to 2, pixel samples 3x3, and min ray samples is 4.
my current understanding is that the total samples for that light is either

(IF - original samples < min ray samples, set samples to min ray samples, ELSE - use original sampling) x (pixel samples)
(if 2 < 4, samples = 4, else 2) x (3 x 3)
4 x 9 = 36 Total Samples

OR

(samples) x (min ray samples) x (pixel samples)
(2) x (4) x (3 x 3) = 72 Total Samples

So yeah, which way does it use to calculate it? Or am I waaaaay out in left field here and completely misunderstanding how this works?

Also, another question I have, is in regards to reflection quality, and reflection angle. In houdini 10, these settings were controlled by area samples and cone angle. I was wondering how the new parameters compare to the old ones.

how does the default value of 1 area sample compare to 0.1 reflection quality
how does say a reflection angle of 5 compare to a cone angle of 5? are they equivalent?

In houdini 10, the v_gilight defaulted to a sampling value of like 256 or something, yet in houdini 11, the default value on the GI light shelf tool is 1. How does the old default of 256 compare to the new default of 1. Based on the quality I've observed I assume the sampling for the gi light works the same as before, and the default value was just changed to speed up previewing?

And finally, is the section of the help file for the new materials/shading system still partially incomplete? A lot of parameters seem to be missing from some of the pages, and when I hover my mouse over parameters on the Mantra surface and hit f1 to bring up the help, I get some error:

“Parm is not a registered Protocol”
followed by a big error message saying something about this error code "0x804b0012 ". (I can post the whole error if you want)

The help hotkey works fine if I use it on parameters for something like a camera or a SOP node though

Well this post is getting pretty big, so ill stop asking questions for now :wink:

Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks