Architectural sampler

The Iray Photoreal architectural sampler can be used to improve the convergence speed of difficult scenes, as such complicated lighting scenarios can then be handled much more efficiently with this sampler. A common scene type that profits from this specialized sampler is indoor architectural visualization, especially if it is mostly illuminated by indirect lighting. One specific example would be a room that is illuminated by light sources placed in neighboring rooms or by outdoor lighting (such as the Sun and Sky model) shining through a small window.

As the sampler introduces additional overhead and also only works well when a lot of iterations need to be spent on finalizing the picture it should be avoided for rather simple scenes, or in general mostly directly lit scenes such as outdoor or design visualization.

The following attribute on the mi::IOptions class, shown here with its default setting, controls the architectural sampler:

bool iray_architectural_sampler = false

Enables the architectural sampler if set to true.

The architectural sampler is only supported in non-interactive mode. If interactive mode is enabled, Iray Photoreal will fall back to its default sampler. Progressive rendering explains how to select the non-interactive mode.

The architectural sampler only supports motion blur that originates from camera motion. Any other motion, for example, from object transformations, is currently ignored by Iray Photoreal.

The architectural sampler can be used in combination with the Caustic sampler to help render caustics more efficiently in difficult scenes and lighting situations.

Note: It is not always beneficial to enable both samplers at the same time as there is additional computational overhead involved that can outweigh the benefits.