Flicker in Specular Highlight

[Morne]

I've got an animation with some nice specular, but in some parts where the specular is sharp, I'm getting CRAZY flicker
Tried AA on
2,16
3,8
1,100
Doesnt appear to make a difference

It's an exterior with VRaySun and VRaySky, VRaySun is invisible
Currently Clamp is on 3, but it makes no difference with it off (except render longer)
Sun Shadow subdivs of 32, 64, 128 doesnt seem to make a difference

I only see the flicker in the specular

[Neilg]

Are you using a sharpening filter?
Try none, or area.
Failing that if it's just one material, detach the specular value from the reflection glossiness and drop it to get a much softer highlight.

[Morne]

None is even worse. I prefer quadratic over area, gives me a much softer result

As for the reflection, I went up and down with the glossy, but doesnt seem to help much even with subdivs on 128. I'll let you know how the unlinking goes. Currently that mat's glossy is on 0.85 with 32 subdivs. Will unlink and stick highlight on 0.7 or so and see how far lens effects get me

[joconnell]

If it's spec it's normally dirty light samples somewhere.

[Morne]

If it's spec it's normally dirty light samples somewhere.

Jip, that's the part that doesnt make sense to me since it's just a VRaySun and VRaySky. No HDRI or dome light. Even tried sticking the VRaySky in a dome just to give it some more samples, but nothing

[tashko.zashev]

Try to make the sun size bigger. Something around "50" or more and see if it helps.

[Morne]

Try to make the sun size bigger. Something around "50" or more and see if it helps.

Even if invisible is ticked?

[tashko.zashev]

Even if invisible is ticked?

Yes, "Invisible" will make the sun invisible to the camera and to reflections. Specular of the materials will still be produced until you uncheck "Affect specular", which you could try too. If you find where the flicker comes from, it will be easy to find a solution.

But try first with bigger size, hope it will fix it.

[alexyork]

Yes, "Invisible" will make the sun invisible to the camera and to reflections. Specular of the materials will still be produced until you uncheck "Affect specular", which you could try too. If you find where the flicker comes from, it will be easy to find a solution.

But try first with bigger size, hope it will fix it.

Hi Tashko,

I know it's been asked many times over the years, but are there plans to break out specular controls from lights so you can really control this independently? For example I'm working on a shot right now where the intensity of the light creates far too dull a specular reflection on objects, but when I increase the multi of the light, the spec looks great but I then get the classic jagged edges around the lights. It would be fantastic if we could simply have a separate "Specular Contribution Multiplier" control in lights so you can crank it up and down but keep the main light multi at 1.0 to avoid these issues.

I hope this is possible. It's an issue we and many others have on a huge number of projects.

Many thanks,

[Neilg]

Can you use another light? turn off affect specular, then make a copy and switch off affect diffuse/affect reflections and turn it up.
Failing that i've found myself separating the spec & reflection values on my materials a lot recently.

[alexyork]

Can you use another light? turn off affect specular, then make a copy and switch off affect diffuse/affect reflections and turn it up.
Failing that i've found myself separating the spec & reflection values on my materials a lot recently.

Yep this is what I'm currently doing - a mixture of the two. A simple control for it in lights would negate all these work-arounds though.

[Morne]

Increasing the light size to 50 makes shadows too soft. And the specular issue still there.
In the material I'm un-linking the specular now and bringing that down to see if it gets better

[CAPTURE_MM]

you can also use subpixel mapping and turn down the clamping. but of course, your image won't look exactly the same concerning the brightness and shape of your other highlights.
once, this helped me out with sun-sparkles on a simple carpaint, mostly visible on fine edges.

[svetlozar.draganov]

Increasing the light size to 50 makes shadows too soft. And the specular issue still there.
In the material I'm un-linking the specular now and bringing that down to see if it gets better

Would it be possible to attach a simplified version of the scene for investigation?
Thank you in advance.