Flickering During Animated Sequence

[Allegro]

Hey there, I just purchased the preview on Friday...  spent the weekend trying to get acquainted with the program as I'm hoping to use it for a couple of scenes in my graduate film.  I got a set-up that I'm relatively happy with, but the problem, is that when I try to render out a sequence, the lighting seems to flicker each frame.

Any ideas what could be wrong/how to fix this?  I wanted to do a slow truck-out... it'll be disappointing if I end up having to do the two scenes as a still.  I've attached the scene.  The bitmap can be found http://www.allegromation.com/Terragen/cracked_texture-6.bmp and a .mov test animation is http://www.allegromation.com/Terragen/Test.mov.

Oh... and... as a request to the Planetside team.  PLEASE make it more friendly for animating!  Perhaps I'm wrong, but I can't seem to find any sort of a graph editor for animation.  It would be really nice to be able to tweak keys with a graph like in other 3d aps.  It'd also be really nice to be able to have a wireframe w/o backfaces option or something for viewing, so you can preview animation nice and quick in the viewport without rendering.  Finally, it would be nice if your renderer could "hold" images.  Would make iterating a little nicer than having to compare it with a saved image.

[king_tiger_666]

try rendering it with GI turned to 0

[neon22]

well I checked the obvious stuff:
- nothing else is animating (also checked the tgd file in a text editor)
- quality is pretty high for atmo - so not there...
So tried to render without cumulus - still see effect in first few frames :-(
also tried turning motion blur to 0 - no change
Still flickering....

( I see some flickering in your clouds also - maybe cumulus quality setting =64 is not high enough)
Try 128.

ahhh.. GI is on 2 - I guess this feature isn't stable in the animation mode yet :-(
works if you set it to 0 - no flicker.

(Pity the repeating pattern causes aliasing artifacts - its a nice cracked mud texture)

[old_blaggard]

Yeah, GI doesn;t work fantastically with animations just yet.

[Allegro]

Wow, thanks for the quick responses.  I thought of GI as I was getting into bed, as I read some other posts where people suggested that GI should never be turned on the clouds, and figured I'd test that today.  I'll keep that in mind on my next scene, but for the sake of what I was trying to get across for this one scene, I'm going to render just a single frame and animate the lens curvature very slightly in Premiere.  I'm also planning on animating some Maya fluids to get a sand/storm type of look, so this method should make it a bit easier too as I don't need to worry about matching camera moves in such a tight deadline.  I'm also not overly worried about the aliasing in this case because of the sandstorm that will be composited over.

For my final render, I've boosted the quality on the clouds & atmos to 82, set the rendering qualty to .9, and anti-aliasing to 3.  I'll post the animation when it's done.

Cheers!

[Dark Fire]

GI seems to have a lot of issues at the moment. I wonder if they will be fixed in the update...

[Oshyan]

Allegro, the flickering problem was discussed fairly thoroughly in a previous thread starting here (mostly on page 2): http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=246.msg1506#msg1506

You can find the fill light setup as a sticky in the File Sharing area.

GI actually works quite well with clouds, but as you can see in animation it can be problematic - clouds or no. GI baking will be implemented in a future version. Unfortunately GI improvements will not be coming in this next update.

We do plan a proper timeline and motion curve editor. Remember that you're working with a Technology Preview; there is still a lot of development to be done before we reach the final release. Animation functions will definitely be improved by then.

- Oshyan

[Dark Fire]

...GI baking will be implemented in a future version. Unfortunately GI improvements will not be coming in this next update.

Oh well...At least I now know the name for the fix we're looking for. It seems like such a logical name, I'm wondering why I didn't think of it before...

[Allegro]

Hey-o

Finished that scene that I started on Saturday.  I rendered a single frame from TG2, tried to fake the camera move in After Effects, and put several layers of dust animation from Maya on top.  Just thought I'd post a link to the 4 second clip for those who are interested in seeing my first attempt at TG.

http://www.allegromation.com/Terragen/Sc6.mov

I'm currently making a 45 second, cg documentary about the Aral Sea.  Hope to finish it by the end of the month.  7 more scenes to go!

[old_blaggard]

Great job!  I'm looking forward to the rest!  If you could post some future scenes, or maybe the documentary when it's done, that would be awesome.

[fmtoffolo]

wow!! thats amazing!! the dust flying around, the cracked earth, the clouds,, perfect!

[Dark Fire]

OMG! That's amazing! Make more!

[Allegro]

Allegro, the flickering problem was discussed fairly thoroughly in a previous thread starting here (mostly on page 2): http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=246.msg1506#msg1506

You can find the fill light setup as a sticky in the File Sharing area.

GI actually works quite well with clouds, but as you can see in animation it can be problematic - clouds or no. GI baking will be implemented in a future version. Unfortunately GI improvements will not be coming in this next update.

We do plan a proper timeline and motion curve editor. Remember that you're working with a Technology Preview; there is still a lot of development to be done before we reach the final release. Animation functions will definitely be improved by then.

- Oshyan

Glad to hear, I knew it was a preview, but I wasn't sure how close to the final product it would be.  Thanks everyone else for the positive response to my scene.  I hope to get more done soon!