Heavy Flicker in GI pass - Having trouble getting rid of it

[Deflaminis]

Hello, I'm having some pretty nasty flicker in my GI pass with Vray 3, and I just can't seem to solve it. I get the exact same problems if I use BF/LC and IR/LC, which is super odd.

You can see it here: http://www.diffus3d.com/Outbox/Flicker.mov

I'm no newbie to animation, but this one has me licked. All the passes are clean, except for the GI pass, and I've re-rendered this about nine times now but same problem every time. (Isn't it weird that the blue one seems to be immune to this, but the back one isn't?)

I did the IR/LC as (animation prepass) and rendered it as animation rendering. I also did BF/LC letting it calc each frame at 256 subdivs for BF. I don't get traveling noise or flicker, which I would expect with this setup, but I get full object flicker, and it looks the same for both rendering styles. (Bah!) For the irradiance map I tried Interp. Frames at both 1 and 2 and it looks exactly the same. (And again, with BF.)

I think it should be noted that I'm using a texture in the light texture slots, and I think that's is where the problem is coming from. (There is a comptex with the texture to get it colored, but I think this is causing the problems.) I have a white square diffusor as exr (with alpha), multiplied by the color in a comptex. Am I just out of luck? I am also using embree and embree for motion blur. Not sure if that matters.

Anyone seen this one? Hate to remove my texture diffusor because of the hard highlights, but I'm stuck and if I have to, I have to. I'm doing a half res test now with no textures on the lights at all, and I'll post results after lunch.

[glorybound]

It's a raining day, hench the umbrellas, and that is flashes of lighting.

[Deflaminis]

I like it. Wish I could sell it to my creative director. We all got a good laugh regardless.

[Morbid Angel]

brute force gi. The shots are simple enough, it wont be a killer to the render time.

[Deflaminis]

EDIT: Morbid Angel was right, using BF/BF together does stop the problem, though takes a little bit longer. However anything with Light Cache is getting the weird flicker. I wonder which of my light cache settings is messing things up. Here's the image.

Pre-filtering? Retrace? Should I have enabled use for glossy rays? Thanks for any tips, at this point it's academic but I'd like to solve it as the next shot in the spot won't be loving all BF.

I did a test without the maps on the lights and it's the same problem, so I ruled that out. It's down to LC being the culprit.

[Morbid Angel]

can you look at your raw passes and see whats happening there.

Also it could be something else entirely like a cutoff issue. Or geo sampling issue (are you using motion blur?)

[Deflaminis]

Yes I'm using motion blur (vray 3 so 1/42ish), and I've checked the other passes they are clean and wonderful. It's definitely the LC but I don't know why. did a test with IR/BF and it also looked great, so somehow my LC is on strike.

EDIT: Looks like the problem isn't actually related to GI, though it's showing on the GI passes. It seems one of my render slaves just renders it differently. Maybe even generated the GI differently. Going through the debugging process now.

[Deflaminis]

I have to post here in case this comes up for anyone else. The problem wasn't GI in the end... the problem was... me.

I failed to notice that the render slave wasn't accessing the maps folder properly, and there were 2 textures that it wasn't reading. When I restarted my slave a few days ago I failed to notice that it didn't automatically connect to a network drive, and as such was missing 2 maps on each render that were important to the tops of the umbrellas.

I hate to admit this in the forums (since it was PEBKAC) but if someone else has this problem it's the likely solution. I knew that flicker wasn't a normal type of flicker. To make matters worse all my small sized render tests were local so I thought I had solved the problem.

I'm officially blaming the dog, and I assure you he's been fired from the team.



Thank you for everyone that helped me here.

[Neilg]

He doesn't look happy with the socks in his severance package.