matching H10 area lights to H11 in PBR

[watchman]

Hello everyone,

I opened an old project done in H10 and now I need to do some changes.

Using PBR render I get completely different results. I tried checking on/off "Normalize Light Intensity to Area" and I messed around with some other parameters, but no luck.

Shouldn't project continuity be SideFX policy? Does it mean that I now have to throw many hours of work just because I've upgraded to the new version?

Is there any trick to achieve the exact match?

Could you please help me, or point me to a thread where this was discussed?

Thank you very much.

[LaidlawFX]

The light otls were rebuilt for h11 which is a good thing, and not all things can be made backwards compatible, some stuff really needs to be thrown out. Trust me you'll enjoy the the improvement in quality and time over H10.

The main solution is to open a your file in h10 and h11 at the same time and match the parameters since they were restructured, so the nodes do not update and your original settings will be wiped simply opening an h10 in h11. In production on major projects when the show gets saved, they save a version of the software for this reason. The fun part is when they do a a new production build that fixes a lot of things you want, but changes something minute that causes head aches.

Once you have matched the settings your file should render pretty close to the same, also your shaders may have gotten effected depending on how they were built to. This is less likely but also a possibility for your render to change.

[watchman]

Hey - thanks for the reply.

I did that already. All the parameters were matched. But the render was still very different.

Then I tried switching the 'Render Target' paremeter in 'Mantra ROP' to 'Mantra 10', but the resulting render had random black blotches all over the image. Any idea about the cause of such artifacts?

Of course I apreciate all the improvments, I just thought that they might have provided a transitional (temporary) OTLs, created ad hoc when importing old projects - but this might be too much to ask for.

Thanks.

[LaidlawFX]

yeah those little things they don't do are wonderful.... they make me soooo happy each day. You could write a script that bakes parameters in h10 and then you could write a conversion/write script. The logic is simple, but it is not my cup of tea, to write stuff like that.

You would have to post a hip file or some images, for me to be of anymore help.

The only random guess I can say is that your sampling on your area light is not sufficient, or you are not using a pbr engine which is better with area lights. There are a bunch of random black "blotch" type patterns it could be, like the aforementioned, to shadows, to displacement, etc.