Skydome Resolution deprecated?

[aaronfross]

Hi,

In MaxToA 3.0.57.0, Skydome Resolution doesn't seem to do anything anymore. It used to control the sampling for specular reflections. Now, it does nothing that I can determine. Is it dead? If so, what does that mean, exactly? Is there no longer a perceived need to optimize environment reflections?

Resolution was actually a cool feature that allowed users to quickly hack blurry reflections without needing to blur the bitmap.

Thanks,

Aaron

[Stephen.Blair]

It's still working for me (tested in Maya and in 3ds Max).

In 3ds Max, I just have a skydome light and a chrome sphere. Is your setup different?

[aaronfross]

OK, it does still work, it just looks completely different. When I zoomed in SUPER CLOSE to the surface I could see the change in Resolution. But in earlier versions of Arnold I got a very visually different result. It used to be that if I set Resolution to 10, I'd get a big blurry color wash that was more or less uniform across each polygon. Now, if I set Resolution to 10, I get a chunky mosaic that varies across each polygon. I guess that hackish blurry reflection effect is no more, but my suspicion is that the current algorithm is better from the standpoint of optimizing memory consumption.
Thanks.