ivars couldn't find anything about a portal light using the maya search? Is it a mentalgay shader? Glib are you using GI + FG and emitting photons from your sky and directional light, if not all that's happening by turning on GI is you are disabling secondary diffuse bounces. Sorry can't post the scene I'm lighting a large…
So I'm really trying to avoid using photons on our current project due baking time constraints has anyone figured out how to get more than 2 bounces of indirect light out of maya final gather? There is that option to turn on secondary diffuse bounces but that's it no option to do 3 or 4 bounces.
I'll run a couple tests with the scene setup you mention, and I'm ready admit I'm wrong since I haven't done any serious mental ray work for at least a year and a half, but I'm still going to bet FG + GI is faster. You need to tweak your settings a fair bit though. With pure FG, you'll end up turning up your FG points and…