Strange behaving of trees in animation

[pagan]

Hi
I am trying to render a small animation with trees as population.
Does anyone knows why the trees move about?
They actually stay in place but their branches kind of flick about...
looks like their leaves are desappearing an re-appearing again from one frame to another.
Is this a bug? is there a solution?

http://www.imagoculture.com/files/Sequence01.mov

[cyphyr]

I would guess this would happen if the model quality in the population node is not set to its highest setting.
Rivhard

[pagan]

where do you change the quality setting of the population?

[pagan]

sorry just found it!
I will try that
Many thanks!

[pagan]

no success , still moving about...but less then before.
I have the highest setting

Just flick the images in the win browser

[rcallicotte]

Matt once said something about the Detail Blending setting for animations - http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2290.msg23827#msg23827

[pagan]

my detail blending is set to 1 should I go higher?
When I rendered a close up of the tree you can actually see branches popping...

[RArcher]

Could be caused by a few things.  First off you will want to keep your detail level to at least 0.5, but preferably 0.75 or around there.  Your AA should be set over 10 at the least for vegetation, and if you are using the GI system, you will have to increase the GI blur radius to around 250.  This should help reduce or eliminate the flickering altogether.

[pagan]

Thanks a lot for all your advice!
I will try that but I guess it will increase enourmously my rendering time, I need to do quite a lot of shots with those trees, do you know a way to speed up the process?
Or I guess I will have to find another way to fake trees, is it possible to use billboards that look always at the camera? But in this way there will be the problems of their shadows


Hi RArcher!
Could you check also this (if I don't ask too much)
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4870.0

I really like the outcrops that you made in that landscape

[Oshyan]

The problem is almost certainly the result of your detail setting and not AA, or even population quality (although this will have an effect as well). My guess is you've got your render detail at about .25 or lower judging by your screenshots, and you can see the large triangles visible in the surface texturing as a result. The tree rendering is also going to be affected by this coarse detail and this results in larger than usual jumps in the rendering of the trees between frames. The only solution is to increase detail.

- Oshyan

[pagan]

I have shoot up to 2 the detail and still having flickering
Is there any expalnation of the GI detail settings?
Do they also affect vegetation?
Shoud I use detail blending?

[pagan]

Ok I have been doing quite a lot of testing and the flickering is almost gone
however it is quite hard to find the right balance between all the parameters.
Basically I have notice that when introducing vegetation the renderng time increses quite a lot because the setting must be higher.
Not a major problem if one has to render one image but, quite a big one if you want to render an entire project of about 8 shots of around 2 min each
It would be nice if in the future the vegetaion could have it's own quality setting and not depending on the detail of the whole scene.
this is because I may be happy with unrealistic vegetation but very detailed landscape or viceversa.
I may be not very good with this settings or doing something wrong, but I think that this would certainly make a different in the choice of using terragen as ladscape renderer.
Still a very good piece of kit which I hope I will use for long...

[rcallicotte]

Did you ever up your value for Detail Blending?

[bigben]

Can you upload a clip of you population node?

[pagan]

Yes I did up my value in the detail blending

ok here is my clip file.

What about the GI What are these?

I just found out that the do ray traced shadows option will increse the rendering time enourmously(obvioulsy)
is there another way to fake shadows?

Also I am not using a distance shader for vegetation..should I? where should I plug it into? Use density shader box?