posterized lighting in shadow areas

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max General
1

This ever happen to anyone? Doing some lighting test for camera animation (was planing to use IR/LC with loaded maps) and for some reason, the shadows and parts of the image in shade have a kind of posterized or banding effect to them. I tried also just doing single frame QMC/LC and its still there,as in the image below. this is a simple scene with one vray light and environment light. I have a vray plane as the floor with simple vray material on both floor and object.

1 vray light, 16 subs
AA QMC 1/4
QMC 24 subs
rQMC 0.002, 16 global subs
LC, 1000 subs, 0.004 sample size (sceen), store direct off, filter: nearest, interp samples: 10.

i thought maybe my LCD monitor was exagerating the banding, but on a CRT, the banding is still there…any thoughts?
thanks

2

Link doesn’t work for me (comes up with gibberish).

3

maybe was TIFF in browser issue..saved as JPG

i used really high QMC setting to get rid of noise but banding/posterizing is still there. I mean that you can see the gradients between the shadow levels, I dont know how else to call it but posterized…

thanks

4

this is a QT of the IR/LC version with the light maps precalculated and loaded. there is no shadow flicker, which is great, but the posterization in the shadows is there as is visible.

5

Do you have ‘clamp output’ on? Could be just a limitation of the 8 bit color space.

6

looks okay to me… i think it’s your screen settings

ern

7

didnt think of that…where would find the clamp output setting…?

8

Yeah, I should have added that as well. Looks fine over here on a calibrated LCD (maybe some ever so slight banding visible but nothing major).

The clamp output is under 'Color Mapping" but if you don’t know where it is probably not checked.

9

i think you guys are right..must be my montior…sometimes very low-level lighting seems to always appear like that..guess need to calibrate..