Anti-aliasing 'marching' - possibly re-render but want to check out workflow idea.

[RobPhoboS]

I've got some objects that had chrome bits on them, stupidly I didn't realise that my anti-aliasing settings weren't very good over an animation (DOH).
However, the only good thing, is that they aren't too large....
So I thought that if I render out a beauty pass again of just the chrome objects, I'm hoping I can just comp the new chrome bits over the aliased ones ?
What would be the best way to ensure I still get correct reflections of other objects in the scene but so they aren't visible (thus hopefully saving some render time?).

Would I use the wrapper material on all of the other objects with their materials as the 'base' (I presume this is ok even if they are blends as the base mat) ?

[Morbid Angel]

I would apply the vray settings node to all objects (except the chrome ones) and set it to be matte with alpha -1. With just that everything will reflect and do what it needs to do, but wont be visible in both render and alpha.

[RobPhoboS]

I would apply the vray settings node to all objects (except the chrome ones) and set it to be matte with alpha -1. With just that everything will reflect and do what it needs to do, but wont be visible in both render and alpha.

Ah the VrayObjectProperties node you mean ?
I've not used it yet.

As in this:
http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/maya...properties.htm

Thanks for your help.

[Morbid Angel]

yeah exactly that. The advantage of this awesome node is that you do not need to apply another shader to your objects, what if you have hundreds of shaders? how would you handle vray wrapper ontop of them? This node can be applied as a single control for multiple objecs or per object control. In any of those cases it allows you to greatly control object properties, reflective properties as well as matte properties.

[RobPhoboS]

It's fantastic !
Wow, I really should get used to using it from now on.

Thank you for the tip, it definitely saves a heap of time.
Just hoping the renders won't be too long now.

I was originally going to try and fix the anti-aliasing in Nuke but I would be fumbling around trying to find a solution I think.

[Morbid Angel]

yeah its a great node. You can layer override it too...which opens a whole new set of opportunities. As to your flickering, it would depend on what kind of flickering it is, how bad it is. Nuke de_noise node can do some good fixes for bad grain. If for example you have a matter for the chrome objects as well as have the reflection in a separate pass, you can clamp the reflection value at 1 in nuke, and apply a softening filter along with denoise and see if that solves your issue. Re-rendering it would be best though.

[RobPhoboS]

yeah its a great node. You can layer override it too...which opens a whole new set of opportunities. As to your flickering, it would depend on what kind of flickering it is, how bad it is. Nuke de_noise node can do some good fixes for bad grain. If for example you have a matter for the chrome objects as well as have the reflection in a separate pass, you can clamp the reflection value at 1 in nuke, and apply a softening filter along with denoise and see if that solves your issue. Re-rendering it would be best though.

Yes the new de-noise is amazing, definitely one of my favourites now.
The flickering is just on bright spots in the chrome's edges, it's not noise as such, personally I think it was my Adaptive DMC settings which caused the issue.
It was set to min 2, max 5 - threshold 0.03
I'm not using indirect illumination, just the very cool dome light.
The rest of the renders looked fine, nothing major, or if I did spot issues I adjusted the threshold or sampling in specific nodes (99% reflections usually).

I can't quite seem to get a nice result but min 5, max 12, thresh 0.02 seems ok - like it got rid of the blocks, I've also switched on clamping, and turned texture filtering off - just in case that is causing an issue.

AA filter was/is Gaussian 1.5
Subpixel mapping is on as well, not sure how that plays with animations.

[Morbid Angel]

in that case you might want to turn on subpixel mapping, it will smooth out edgy highlights in the reflections.

[RobPhoboS]

Yep, it was on already but hopefully the new settings will decrease any issue for now.

Do you know if there is a way to apply the same vray object properties settings to multiple objects in one go ?
At the moment the only way I could make it a bit quicker was to save a preset and apply that.

I must learn how to do some of the scripting for custom buttons, thought of plenty of things to help me out but no idea how to do it !


Edit:
Looks like I can take advantage of the Attribute Spreadsheet

[Morbid Angel]

well you can apply one node to selection, that would effectively make only one vray properties node which will control those objects. Alternatively you can write a for loop to apply commands to all or selected vray properties nodes.