Flickering foliage

[innerlightace]

Hi All.

I'm using the standard chaos flythrough tutorial for an external animation (light cache + IR map multi frame incremental). Nothing moves except the camera. I have lots of proxies as bushes and a few tree proxies also. Weather I render with materials or as a clay animation I simply can not get rid of flickering on the trees and foliage. I have even unticked visible to GI in vray object properties.

I rarely do animations these days and so seek knowledge from you animation experts out there.

Your assistance would be gratefully appreciated.

[vlado]

Can you post a few frames or crops of frames? It might be that the flickering is due to low AA samples rather than GI.

Best regards,
Vlado

[innerlightace]

I will attach hereafter the settings I used.

Thanks Vlado.

[innerlightace]

And the settings vlado.

[Morbid Angel]

Save your self the trouble. Set the primary gi to brute force, secondary to brute force, set your dome light to emit the sky. Set the min/max adaptive samples to 3/32.

Hit render and done!

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Its not GI flickering its ur AA flickering. Jack up the min AA or treshold and that should do it.

Also ur Gamma settings are inaccurate. U should have 2.2 gamme which would reduce flickering as AA would be smarter in cleaning up some of the noise.

[innerlightace]

Hi Dmitry.

Thanks for your response. Brute force would whack my render times up though wouldn't it? I also have 10 scenes to render and edit so I would rather find the right answer to the problem once and get all scenes rendering as fast as possible as well as all future renderings.

[alexyork]

But the question you might need to ask is: how long will it take me to investigate and test this V spending more time at the render farm. For me, in many cases, it's quicker and therefore cheaper to spend more time at the farm and less time on the workstation trying to iron out the issues. Perhaps in your case you have more time available, in which case some testing would be a good idea. Personally I'd go with Morbid's suggestion and just be done with it. Rendering complex, small-scale foliage is always a nightmare in animations.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Dont just skip it and leave it to Brute Force. Do the hard work, trouble shoot it, u'll be smarter for future :s

Its ur AA settings anyway Or it could be light show us render passes raw gi/raw light/ diffuse.

[innerlightace]

Hi Dariusz.

Could you be more specific on the two settings you are referring to? ANd which way to adjust them up or down?

Thank you.

[innerlightace]

Dmitry/Alex/Darrius.

You all make very good points. There is always a limit to how much investigation can be done before one is starting to cut off ones nose desite ones face, so to speak. I prefer the path of trouble shooting and learning more but I also realise that I may need to bite the bullet at some point if I can't solve it. I do have a bit of time to investigate so will persist a while longer but I hear you all and there had been no bad advice. Thanks to you all for the input. IT ALWAYS THE FOLIAGE!!!!!!!! :-O

[innerlightace]

Sorry, I meant Dariusz.

[svetlozar.draganov]

This looks like AA issue, and it is most probably caused either by transparency-levels or filter-maps.
Try to increase AA min samples to at least 2 and decrease DMC noise threshold value.
Remove Filter Maps and increase Max Transperancy-levels to 100 from Global Switches Rollout.

If that doesn't help you could send the scene for investigation to support@chaosgroup.com (FTP could be provided if needed)

[innerlightace]

I have in-boxed you Svetlozar for the FTP info.

Your assistance is appreciated.

Thanks.

[svetlozar.draganov]

Thanks for the scene - we'll notify you as soon as we have some news about it.