Animation Check ~ Compliance with recommendations lowers quality considerably.

Started by cyphyr, July 01, 2012, 06:53:54 AM

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cyphyr

Well as I asked for an animation forum I better ask a q:

On pressing the Animation Check button I'm getting two recommendations, to de-select "Fully adaptive" and "Jitter shading points" which I allow Terragen to do for me. (These are settings held in a "hidden" node within the render node). As you can see this has made a considerable degradation in the terrain quality. Any ideas why and more importantly is their a solution that I can use that will not require prohibitively high render detail and AA settings? Also will leaving the settings "pre-animation check" have any bad effect.

The image attached shows the process. Before Animation check on the left and after on the right.

Cheers

Richard

PS: Just made a quick crop render of the animation and apart from the lower quality I can't see any real difference. There is a little terrain popping in both at the same time and place but I would expect that to be covered by populations and atmospherics. Of course this version is without populations, models and most of the atmospherics and rendered at 0.6,4 (GI 1,2,8) so maybe higher render settings will alleviate the popping but I'm not happy with the low res terrain.

PPS: a little further info here http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=14610.msg142603#msg142603 so yes the quality is expected to be lower but I'm surprised at how much.
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Hannes

I experienced that unchecking "Fully adaptive" causes this kind of quality loss. I'd recommend to leave it checked all the time (Matt wrote somewhere:
"OFF may reduce detail unsatisfactorily in some places or put needless detail in others, but if you need absolutely pop-free animation it might need to be OFF in current versions.")

Recently I did an animation and used the Animation check settings except the Fully adaptive uncheck. Be sure that you have set "Detail blending" to 1. This increases rendertimes, but it's worth it.

Additionally in the "Advanced" tab of the render settings set "Ray detail region padding" at least to 0.5. See Oshyan's explanation here:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=5988.msg62977#msg62977
This should eliminate the terrain and/or shadow popping.

Oshyan

Having Fully Adaptive unchecked doesn't always result in this level of problem. I've mostly noticed it with more extreme displacements. It even seems in your example image as if the terrain aside from the part sticking up looks ok. Matt will have to weigh in with more info, but I suspect the adaptive detail is what's taking care of otherwise lower detail on your outcrop, but that this added detail subdivision is not consistent between frames (or can't be guaranteed consistent at least).

- O shyan

cyphyr

Thanks guys.
If it's down to extreme displacements than that would make sense. The entire scene suffers from displacement maximus!
The small hill is a recent addition (solves some timing issues) added with a simple bitmap.
I'm getting tempted to "bake" out a lower res version of the terrain as a .ter and re-import and re-add the detail, possible solution?
It may mean I could get away with a few less Compute terrain's!
Cheers
Richard
www.richardfraservfx.com
https://www.facebook.com/RichardFraserVFX/
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Oshyan

Yes, "baking" some base displacement to a heightfield is not a bad option in cases where there are lots of successive displacements and you're working in a confined area. Of course you would have to do this before any overhangs were created (if there are any in your case).

- Oshyan

Tangled-Universe

Heightfields also render considerably faster.
When I was working on Crater Lake image with Frank we decided to export the TG-terrain and erode it in World-Machine.
We replaced the procedural terrain with the heightfield and only added shading/textures and some fake stones.
All in all that gave quite a rendercut.

I believe Matt even replaced the planet for a single plane for the Paramount anniversary logo project and that that also would cut the time a bit further. This would need to be confirmed though, but can easily tested by ourselves of course.