Current best practice for reducing bright spot flicker

[werticus]

I have some very fine (sub pixel) sized glowing objects (using vray light mat) in the distance of this scene that flicker like crazy.

Is there a way to force an object to always appear, like a fixed screen size sprite or something?

Or is there some known render settings we can use with vray 4? Seems like all older forum posts refer to using an out of date image sampling method that does not exist anymore.

I tried 2/4 bucket sampler and I tried sub pixel mapping so far. We have 3000 frames to render and I really want those distant lights to be rock solid.

Currently using BF 2/4 with sub pixel mapping + Hash Map LC.
Going to try clamping now.

[fixeighted]

Well I know it's hacky but you could export position data into AE or whatever you use and then use a card with texture lights on it, or similar approach.
Even a card in Max may work better than actual lights if they are so distant.
At least with a separate layer you can explore more options, if the rest of the frame is good

Other than that, maybe others have a better scene-based solution that doesn't take a week a frame

[JonasNöll]

Hi,
you could try to disable the visability of those bright lightsources in your normal rendering and then render them seperately on black with a much higher resolution. Then scale down the resolution and add both layers together in comp.
Or you just render them seperately in same resolution with much higher antialiasing settings for the light dots, thats probably the same.
Anyway my point is your resolution overall now is too small and your antialising settings are too low. You light sources are smaller than 1 pixel in size, that's why in some frames they disappear and in some the appera. If you supersample those pixel it would overall become more stable.
By seperating both layers you can try to get around that by just supersampling your problem areas, this way you wouldn't need to waste your rendertime on the parts that you feel are fine by supersampling the whole image

[JonasNöll]

Well I know it's hacky but you could export position data into AE or whatever you use and then use a card with texture lights on it, or similar approach.
Even a card in Max may work better than actual lights if they are so distant.
At least with a separate layer you can explore more options, if the rest of the frame is good

Other than that, maybe others have a better scene-based solution that doesn't take a week a frame

Yes, did something like this before and it worked. Put a locator on each light and then exported everything to nuke. Then we placed 2d carts with a light texture there instead. Worked fine.

[^Lele^]

A (much) higher min AA settings will fix it.
Likely, as the min AA is now, it's not finding the sub-pixel detail at each frame, and the adaptive algo will skip it in the later phases (as there is nothing worth adapting to there in the first place.)
You will want a min AA value which makes sense with the size of your detail: how many times the detail is smaller than the pixel will decide what sampling is worth pursuing.
2 is definitely not enough, but on the brighter side you can test out what min AA you'll need on the specific section only, as it won't dramatically change the look, or rendertime, of the rest of the image.
Ofc, if you can handle post work, and you deem the time to set it up and render shorter than a fire and forget solution in 3d, then go to town with it.

[werticus]

Thanks guys - I have run the render of the self illuminating parts at 8/8 AA samples and it seems pretty solid. The rest of the render at 1/4 - It's just a draft at this stage, i'll do more testing this week to see where final quality goes to.