Eduardo. Olha o texto do manual do mental ray sobre importons e IP. É bem interessante.
Importons
Importons are "virtual particles". In some aspects they are similar to photons: they bounce in the scene. There are significant differences though: unlike photons, importons do not distribute energy. Instead, they contain a color describing with which factor an illumination at a certain location would contribute to the final image. That way, they provide an information for the rendering core on how the computational efforts should be distributed in order to get an image of best quality with limited computational resources.
Unlike photons, importons are emitted from the camera and bounce towards lights, i.e. in the direction opposite to the photons. However, the duality of lights makes it possible to apply photon shaders to importons. For simplicity reason, mental ray does not introduce a new type of shaders but uses photon shaders for importons as well.
Importons are used as a supplementary mechanism which improves the rendering quality and performance. It is used as the primary mechanism to drive the quality of irradiance particles. Another usage in current mental ray is to improve the quality of the globillum photon map. It allows to dramatically reduce the size (and thus speed up lookup) of photon maps with a help of the merging within a variable merging distance which is determined with the help of importons. Such variable merging distance is superior to the existing constant merging distance.
If enabled, importons are shot before photon maps are created. They are used to during the globillum photon map creation. As the are not relevant for globillum photon map nearest neighbor lookups, importons are discarded once the photon map is created.
The importons map is controlled by scene options.
Irradiance Particles
This algorithm is a novel approach to compute global illumination based on importance sampling, which tends to converge much faster to a desirable quality than the existing solutions like global illumination photon tracing combined with final gathering.
Before rendering starts, importons are shot from the camera into the scene and collected as a new kind of particle, called an irradiance particle. They carry information about the amount of direct illumination coming in at their position (hence the name "irradiance") and, optionally, the amount of indirect irradiance incident at their position (if indirect passes are enabled). During rendering, the stored particles are used to estimate the irradiance at a shading point: if just direct illumination was collected for irradiance particles, this is equivalent to one bounce of indirect lighting.
The irradiance can also be interpolated from precomputed values at the particle positions.
The irradiance particle algorithm simulates some but not all of the indirect lighting interactions of the traditional global illumination algorithms in mental ray. For this reason, if irradiance particles are enabled then mental ray will turn off the global illumination photon tracing automatically if it was activated. This is a common situation when external applications are asked to generate mental ray scenes with photon shaders attached, which are needed for importons. Caustics can be used together with irradiance particles because they are used to capture indirect lighting effects that irradiance particles cannot simulate. If both final gathering and irradiance particles are enabled then final gathering is preferred and irradiance particles will be switched off automatically.
Irradiance particles support a special IBL-style functionality which can be enabled by setting the number of indirect passes to -1. In this case only the environment map lighting but not diffuse bounces are taken into account. If interpolation is disabled then only environment presampling map is build and no further precomputation steps are required. If interpolation is enabled then particles are emitted in the precomputation pass in a usual way, but used as interpolation points only.