3 second animation test.

[Henry Blewer]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYCDVHyEG14

A test to see how my settings work for animation. Help would be greatly appreciated.

There is a little atmosphere flickering and a shadow in the lower corner moves oddly. VistaPro 3 and 4 had similar issues.

Render settings I used.

Detail 0.55
AA 6 with raytraced atmosphere
Cubic B-Spline Anti-aliasing bloom On
Detail blending 0.5
Microvertex jittering On
Detail jittering On
Ray detail region padding 0.375
GI prepass padding 0.275
Atmosphere samples 8

You may need to download this and loop it to see the result better.

[Henry Blewer]

I guess I used fairly descent settings... Would increasing the atmosphere quality setting help with the flicker? It's not bad, but I find it annoying.

[Oshyan]

I presume you're using GI. What are your GI settings?

- Oshyan

[Henry Blewer]

I don't have the GI checked in the render settings. The environment setting is at the default.

I think I can smooth this out using the Blender compositor nodes. Did you look at it? The flicker is not a huge problem, but not good.

I did a test using the H.264 codec. It's better. The shadow glitch is gone.

[Oshyan]

What you're saying is a bit confusing. You don't have GI "checked" in the render settings, but there are no check boxes for it. If GI Relative Detail is not 0, and the Enviro Light is enabled, GI will be used. Does your render have a GI Prepass phase?

Additionally, you say the "shadow glitch" is gone by simply changing your video codec. So perhaps it's not a rendering issue at all? Or is this a different issue than the flickering? Do you have a way of previewing your animation prior to compressing to video? I use Djv View (render to TIFF, it does not support BMP), and it's great for getting a realtime view of rendered frames before compressing to video. If you can confirm that it's a problem even before compression, then we can work on render settings to resolve it.

- Oshyan

[Henry Blewer]

What I meant was that GI surface detail in the render settings quality tab is not checked. Also, Blender will play image sequences before compression. The flicker is more noticeable playing back just the image sequence in Blender.

The shadow glitch seems to be a compression artifact from the first 20 frames. It may be a Blender thing. Rendering 15 extra frames at the start and end of the anim, then clipping the anim after compression may give a better averaging(?) over the entire animation.

I will probably have my new rig running by September (I7 system). The main reason I bought the animation package is for a project where I'll need motion blur for a still image (wheels turning on a vehicle, so it looks like it was moving, not parked.)

A guide of some sort of what settings to use for animation would be great. It took me a couple hours to ferret out the settings I used in the forum threads.

I did change the GI settings to GI relative detail 1, GI sample quality 5, GI blur radius is 20.

[Oshyan]

Ok, GI Surface Detail wasn't what I was referring to though when I said "you are using GI". Whether GI Surface Detail is enabled has no effect on whether GI is used, it's just an additional enhancement when GI *is* rendered. As I said, if GI Relative Detail is greater than 0 and the Enviro Light is enabled, GI should be calculated. In your case it sounds like GI *was* enabled.

When you say you "did change the GI settings", do you mean those are the settings you used in the 1 second animation you've posted, or you changed to those GI settings since posting this thread and getting some feedback? It looks like the problem may be GI related so I would try GI detail 2, sample quality 6 next. You may also try slightly increasing atmosphere samples, maybe to 12, as this can have an effect on how Atmosphere GI samples are calculated.

- Oshyan

[Henry Blewer]

Cool. Thanks Oshyan. I have about 2 seconds of frames rendered now. I am going to let the current settings continue while I am at work. That should give me nearly 3 seconds to play with. I test out the settings you've suggested on something more interesting. This landscape was quick and dirty for experiments.

[Oshyan]

Ok. Still curious if the GI settings you mentioned are what you were already using or not.

- Oshyan

[Henry Blewer]

I am still using the first setup's settings.

[Oshyan]

But you don't mention what the GI settings were in your first post.

- Oshyan

[Henry Blewer]

GI settings to GI relative detail 1, GI sample quality 5, GI blur radius is 20.

No, I did not think they were turned on because the GI surface details checkbox was not checked.

[Henry Blewer]

I have 3 seconds now. I think the atmosphere quality samples are making the trouble. I'll try 16 on the next. This uses only 8 samples and ray traced atmosphere. 8 samples would probably work on a still image.

The GI detail and sample quality I would prefer the avoid using. But it may be necessary. Uploading the video to YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPAd1PtnEwk&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

[Seth]

use Fill Lights instead of GI, and you won't have flickering animation

[Henry Blewer]

I'll try it. Thanks for the idea. It would probably render faster also.