AA, trees, animation, flicker....usual stuff

[sine_mare]

Stuck with this golf course animation... only problems on the way to the perfect animation...

proxies solved, trees are distributed, memory is no longer an issue... however last few days i've spent managing AA for my trees in scene - those far away from camera.

I've tried each and every suggestion from the forum... some did the trick pretty well but the thruth is (as i concluded) if you want to achieve complete flicker-free result in animation like this one, you have to have render farm since 25 min per frame is not acceptable...

Anyhow, i'm posting two images from the movie, from 2 following frames... if you look at them you will see that trees in front are quit still, but those in back are the problem.

www.focusgrupa.com/1.jpg

www.focusgrupa.com/2.jpg

My current settings are:

Adaptive DMC 1,5
Video filter
IR/LC saved prepasses
Vray 1.5 SP1
Max 2008

Frame time now is cca. 5 minutes on DR with two PCs with configuration (that is not really state-of-the-art):

AMD X2 64 3800+
3 gb ram
XP SP3

so if you can think of any trick how i could increase AA quality but not send rendering time sky high.... i would appreciate it.

thank you

sinisa

[joconnell]

Only thing you can do on this is use motion blur - I did a similar ad a few years back with a sweep down into a forest and the small leaves killed me. Motion blur was the only way to get over the flickering problem. On a side note depending on how many different plants you have I also got far quicker render times by not using proxies - I did a few different qualities of trees in terms of leaf count and detail and it gave me far better times - so much so I could use proper 3d blur. If you're stuck with proxies maybe give it a go using the motion blur render effect.

[percydaman]

you say your using adaptive dmc for AA, but don't show your global dmc settings, which drives the quality of the AA.

[sine_mare]

@joeconell

Now that you've mentioned question regarding proxy - i keep reading that if someone has only few types of trees, better is to stick with common instances than to vray proxies... but how come that thousands of proxies in the scene doesn't make any problems, and thousands of instanced trees (only one type) crashes my pc? not to mention slow viewport refresh... using instances instead proxies would give me also few more tools to use - e.g. Material randomizer from soulburn, however i've managed to make forest only with proxies...

Motion blur effect didn't achieved very good effect, unfortunattely

@percy
sorry, i was in a hurry and i forgot to write AA global settings. I will post that tomorrow when i'm back in office...

[joconnell]

I've rendered instanced trees up to around 30 million polys I think and I ended up with 5 different types of trees - pretty much different qualities depending on how far they were form the camera. This was on machines with 2 gigs of ram. On the motion blur issue our camera moves were a lot quicker so it might have worked better in that case...

[sine_mare]

So, my settings are:

DMC Sampler
adaptive amount: 1,0
Noise treshold: 0,001
Time Ind. ticked
Min. samples: 8
Global subdiv. 1,0
Path samples is grey (inactive)

Adaptive DMC image sampler:
Min/max 1/4
use DMC sampler treshold ticked

Cheers

Sinisa

[joconnell]

1/4 isn't enough for something like that - having the noise threshold down so low mightn't be effective enough without having your max dmc samples higher.

[Neilg]

I tend to have mine on around 1,8 for an animation that needs to be rendered quickly and up to 1,12 for somewhere where quality mattters.
I also hate the use of any sort of antialiasing filter, but that might be a personal thing.

5 minutes a frame on that hardware sounds fairly low, I dont think youre going to get it much lower without some significant changes to the way the scene has been made up.

[glyph]

wouldnt this be a case to try post blur in after effects with ReelEffects smart motion blur?
plus a bit of dof blur in post ??

[sine_mare]

@cubic
actually i was hoping to get confirmation that 1/8 or 1/12 AA settings ARE neccessary, and that hardware is the issue. Going to HW shop tomorrow

@glyph
will give a try, thanks.

[zoranm]

With so much small detail I don't think that you have any other option but to increase AA to 2/4. BTW I prefer to use Area filter with velue 1.6 than video filter which is too soft for my liking.
Regards

Z.

[Neilg]

Why 2/4, wouldnt that be really slow?

[zoranm]

Why 2/4, wouldnt that be really slow?

Well, that's the minimum I usually go in these situations, which effectivelly supersample image and can still render in an acceptable time frame.
Just my $0.002

Z.