Animation Settings - Moving parts, animated opacity

[schroeder]

We're doing an animation with 70 moving parts, each with animated opacity, all assembling themselves into the final product.

There are 5100 frames to be rendered, and I'm trying to find the best way to get this rendered, flicker-free. Last approach we used was to render the IR pre-pass, then the final animation all using backburner (across a few rendernodes). But, for some reason, even though we used a 3-frame Interpolation of the pre-pass IR maps on the final animation (logic being that the moving parts changed significantly between frames), there was still flicker.

We're going to have lots of these types of projects (animated opacity, moving parts), and really need to arrive at a working solution.

Any ideas?

[vlado]

Things that you can try:

1) If you are using the light cache, try using more subdivs and/or turn off the "store direct light" option. If there are many surfaces (e.g. walls) with color close to white, the light cache will need more subdivs to arrive at a stable solution and in this case you can try to make the materials slightly darker. Turning off the "store direct light" option for the light cache improves its precision at shadow boundaries, which may otherwise cause flickering.

2) Try more hemispheric subdivs for the irradiance map. While the interpolation greatly reduces flickering, you may still need more hemispheric subdivs for difficult scenes.

Also, is the animated opacity in materials, or it is simply object visibility < 1.0?

Best regards,
Vlado

[DaForce]

Yeah, if your animating the object visibility your going to have problems.. mainly a VERY slow render. The only way around this is to have it at 0.0 at one frame and 1.0 the next, if your animating between those 2 values over a few frames its going to kill your render.

[QuakeMarine1]

my 2 cents

if possible do NOT render the opac. blend in vray
render 2 sequencies for the blend -with obj and without obj.- and blend it together in post

in some cases its possible to pre render the LC flythrou and IR multi.incr. even you have animated obj in the scene
imagen a door opens over 20 frames then you can pre-render all that frame by frame and noone will notice the different

breath deep and scratch you head again
do you REALY need GI in your "animation with 70 moving parts" and 5100 frames?
what if the client need chances ? re-baking GI again! no easy "mask rendering" !
render fixes do not fit togehter!

fake GI + occlusion

bake render all non animated stuff with GI and all anim. obj. to layer using no GI

use QMC for GI

use QM1 for rendering

[schroeder]

I think fake GI & occlusion is going to have to be the solution here. Can't manage to get rid of the flickering even with the above suggestions. Dealing with the revisions is killing the project timeline when it comes to GI.

I wish this could be done in post... It's a nightmare file to render, 1 continuous shot, 70+ moving parts all with animated visibility. Anyway, we'll have another 50+ projects similar to this, 1/2 of which were set up by the previous consultants. Streamlining this is top priority....

[etown]

Did you check "sub-pixel mapping" and "clamp output" in color mapping? This usually fixes that issue for me.