Best GI workflow in H11?

[oldiesgoodies]

Hi

I have been using GI in other renderers like Modo, Mentalray etc. I have found that Houdini`s GI section is slow unfortunately. Even when I decrease all the possible sampling to the lowest possible I am not getting anywhere close to those renderer`s as far as speed vs quality goes. This is the case for indirectlight and environment light(which seems even slower)

So I am hoping that I might be able to gather some tips and tricks about setting up various GI methofs inside Houdini.

I have watched couple master class and PQuint videos , they were all helpful for explaining the general setup, but noone of those were about the speeding up and getting more for the buck. But most of those tutorials were for past versions.

In case I was doing something wrong with my own set ups, I loaded the the "IndirectLightBox.otl" file under examples folder and start messing with it.

The scene comes with indirectlight+pbr set up. I then change to raytrace and render it. The first thing is that the final result is not same as Pbr. It is quite darker. I have the diffuse limitset to 10. What I get is also slow and low quality render. Then I enable irradiance caching which speeds up the render quite a bit but then that introduced very visible blotches which I could not get rid of no matter what I do. For example I increased pixel sampling to 8, increased GI light filter settings, decreased IC sampling distance etc, it did not help much.

The reason I want to use raytrace or micropolygon is that I am not familiar with pbr shader setups and I would like to use what I know best at the moment.

Does GI light supposed to only work with Pbr engine? I can see the "Direct Global Photon Map" while the raytracer is enabled but for some reason that does not seem to contribute to the final image as much as it does with Pbr?

It would be great to see some decent speedy gi setups. I am also interested in seeing somewhat realworld production examples.

thanks