Flickering in animation....

[John G.]

Hey everyone, Well i finally started rendering out my animation. I rendered out a FGM @ every 30th frame first, and saved a photon map. Then rendered to an avi. overall it's not to bad, but the grout lines which are just a bump map flicker real bad. As does my floor which is just 2A&D in a MSO Material placed on a plane with different material ID's. My FG was set to draft, .1 density, 50rays, 30 interpolate, 0 bounces, 1 weight, for creating my FGM. Then my rendering settings for the whole animation was, 1 & 16, Mitchell filter, and i left everything else alone. Does anyone have any suggestions as to why this happened, i'm looking at putting one of the 3 animations i created up on a ftp site so you can see them.
Any suggestions would be greatly apreciated.

Thanks,
John Gray

[MasterZap]

Easier if we can see something. But did you remember to set your FG map to "Read Only"? (The right checkbox above the "FG Map" filename thingy)

/Z

[John G.]

ok here is the information.....
Goto "My Computer"
Put: ftp://ftp.dewolff.com/ In the address bar
Username: dewolff
Password: guest
then there will be a marcy folder..... (just ignore then end....it stops on a wall and just hold there....i'll cut all that out)

and yes i did check off the read only box.

[3DMadness]

Try rendering with 4/16, maybe its a sampling flicker.

[nisus]

Hi John,

Flickering is very common with bump maps in animation. This is because the bump is an optical effect, that is rendered again every frame. For architectural images, most of the time, the resolution of animations is way to small to get a decent bump effect, or at least a consequent solution over the range of frames. Basicly there are just not enough pixels for the amount of detail you are after.
Another problem that makes this worse is 'almost' horizontal lines... The anti-aliasing can have a real problem with this, because it only has a few pixels to draw an angled line.

Both these issues are so common in arch.viz (think 'brick wall')
that I would recommend you to draw the bump (e.g. gaps in masonry) in the diffuse slot, using an RGBmultiply.
This way, you got the gaps but not (most) of the flickering.

rgds,

nisus

ps: still haven't seen your animation at this point, but as a wild guess it should be almost on target... or at least pretty close...

[John G.]

NISUS, i hope you can take a look at it, the location is listed above at my FTP site.....
Thanks for your suggestions,. i'll look into the RGB option, i'm not 100% sure how that works.

[MasterZap]

I saw the animation, most flicker I saw was sampling related.

My tips are: Make sure your "low" sampling is *at least* 1. Never "1/4" for the low sampling for an animation.

Turn on "Jitter", which solves a lot of "blinking horizontal lines" problem (since each sample is slightly offset quasi-randomly, they won't hit/miss a horizontal line "consistently" like what happens when jitter=off which causes these horizontal lines to "blink")


/Z

[photons]

Hi, what if we use a dispacement instead of a bump. time is not a problm as long as the output is right.
will that work.. along with ur sample settings...me just wondering.. Oo
~photons.