Advice for roads and markings

[Dman3d]

Working on a tour. The camera angle is high and everything is working
well except for the road markings and parking stripes, where high
contrast thin object are.

They blink and are noisy compared to the rest of the scene.
They are geometry that has a small extrusion sitting just above the road
surface. The roads and parking areas have vertex paint.

I know the QMC needs to be tighter and the image sampler needs to be
pumped a bit more but I am wondering if there is a "cheap" way to pull
this off with a tolerble amount of noise but as long as the entire line
shows up.

Tried adaptiv sub, adaptive qmc and fixed. Adaptive QMC at 2/100
makes it snap but costly! Doing them matte/shadow now to overlay them
in post.

[RePlay]

Not sure what you mean unless you post a picture BUT:

Check that "secondary rays bias" is set to larger than 0. eg 0.001.
Use lofts for roads (easier to map) and renderable splines as line markings (put checker maps to make dashed etc) If the camera is from a distance then you can have the line markings as "cylindrical" so that there is no height gap. This will avoid any excess shadow calculations and overall look better.

Also I use Irr map and Light Cache. Now with 1.5 you can use "Detail Enhancement".

Hope this helps.

[Dman3d]

Good ideas. At this point I have rendered them scanline but trying to
get the alpha on to them, there are alot of proxies they pass behind,
trees, buildings and what not. I hope the alpha from the vray render will
work. (in post)

I doubt it becase of the render

Lol I wish there was a way to make VRay act like scanline but read
proxies so I can just get a cleaner alpha

[jonahhawk]

CoPlanar Polygons...

We do striping in a similar way; with geometry. Its often easier to edit and make changes later. I use splines with the Sweep modifier. (Which also makes great mapping coords)

True, Lofting makes great mapping for curving roads.

The problem you might be having is that the polygons of your stripes are too close to (or directly on) the surface of the road/pavement. V-Ray's GI makes a mess of things when you have two or more polys occupying the same space.

Alternately, this may be Max's "fualt" with those accuracy settings in preferences... someone will know better than I do.

Try elevating your striping off of the surface by 1inch or a few cm. then turn off shadow casting for the striping. this works well for us.

cheers

jonah

[helpdesk]

We almost always loft curb, gutter and roadway profiles. Then unwrap uvw's and paint 'em up..unless you don't want that level of realism.

[gunny263]

Renderable splines w/shadows turned off.
Passing behind proxies shouldn't be a problem at all if you are rendering w/z-depth enabled and compositing in post. Just dial them back a bit if you need to.