hi guys...
i have a question.
i set up final gather in the mental ray tab, and everything is fine. Now my question: is there a way to get the final gather map WITHOUT rendering an image, only to send photons into the maya scene (and to see them with mapViz)?
my intention is to get a final gather map for the whole scene. i don
I am not sure I understand, but you should be able to find the map (if you named it in the renderglobals>FG section) in your project folder>RenderData>mentalray>finalgmap. this map is generated before the image starts rendering.
you could sart a render and kill it after the FG map is created. go to render setting window>translation>export verbosty set this to Progress messages, and in the output/console window you will see when it is complete.
thomas