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General => Terragen Animation => Topic started by: bigben on July 11, 2017, 09:52:41 PM

Title: GI problem?
Post by: bigben on July 11, 2017, 09:52:41 PM
I had a similar issue in a previous animation test and figured I must be missing something.  I get a mix of very dark and "normal" frames running an animation.  TG4, pretty much a default project with the animation check settings adopted.   Any suggestions?

[edit] adding the TGD
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: Dune on July 12, 2017, 02:56:46 AM
I don't know much about animation, but did you make a GI prepass, later called in and blended over a number of frames? Perhaps the eye is so small the GI detail needs to be raised? Or padding of ray detail or GI prepass in the render advanced tab?
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: bigben on July 12, 2017, 03:56:23 AM
No caching of GI, just the default render sequence. The eye is 5m ;)  The only things that's animated is the camera

I had a similar problem with a full globe sequence. I was only rendering every 3 frames then, but of those 3/4 were darker than expected including areas that were lit.
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: cyphyr on July 12, 2017, 04:54:11 AM
Very odd, I downloaded your tgd and rendered the same sequence and had no problems.
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: bigben on July 12, 2017, 05:41:04 AM
Thanks for checking. That's a relief in one sense.
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: bigben on July 12, 2017, 07:40:05 AM
I had a pending Windows update, and or I think my laptop was just tired. Working OK after a reboot.
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: KlausK on July 12, 2017, 06:19:51 PM
Hm, I am out of luck here.
Frames 1,2, and 3 render only the dark reflection. First frame in light green is frame 4.
I ran a few render series during the day and had weird stuff going on in the first frames.
Once frame 2 rendered half dark and half green, on one occasion the frame rendered completely
black, even though the pre-calculated dots while rendering clearly showed the greenish colour.
I also rendered the 80 frame long animation and there were a few more (3-4) darker images
in between besides the first three frames.
My system specs are in the footnote. Windows update ran the last time today
with a few important and recommended updates installing.
I am curious now what might cause this and what my machine is missing...
Cheers, Klaus
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: cyphyr on July 12, 2017, 07:43:57 PM
I did wonder if it's down to low resources but we all have reasonably powerful systems. It's not very scientific but I do see Terragen (and other programs) simply "giving up" on some tasks, without error messages or anything.
Odd ...
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: bigben on July 12, 2017, 10:23:08 PM
I'll keep an eye out for his  ::)
My earth model uses around 5Gb of RAM to load at the moment before dropping back down so I'm likely to push the resources of my little laptop to the limit fairly frequently
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: Kadri on July 12, 2017, 11:32:13 PM

I tried to change some different settings.
There are too many things to change of course but nothing worked from what i tried.
It looked at first as it was resolution depending. But then more random...it renders correctly sometimes.
Kind of a bug probably. Even a basic white sphere looks sometimes much different(i am always suspious of reflection,water shaders in Terragen).
Curious what the problem is.


Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: Dune on July 13, 2017, 02:22:30 AM
There was something like this happening in pyramids Dorian was rendering, and believe Matt had some fix (but not sure).
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: Kadri on July 13, 2017, 10:30:53 AM
Quote from: Dune on July 13, 2017, 02:22:30 AM
There was something like this happening in pyramids Dorian was rendering, and believe Matt had some fix (but not sure).

Yes could be that one .
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: dorianvan on July 13, 2017, 05:57:04 PM
Ben, does it do the same thing when you simply render frame 1 from the general tab, without going to the render sequence? Try unchecking GISD too. I've rendered several frames with a version that Matt gave me to try and I don't have an issue with the frames.
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: Oshyan on July 13, 2017, 07:53:11 PM
We do have a fix in an upcoming 4.1 release for some GI-related issues. But you should also almost *always* be using GI caching if you are animating.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: KlausK on July 13, 2017, 08:10:26 PM
This issue is NOT related to rendering out sequences.
In my tests I tried sequences and single frame rendering.
Using the scene file bigben posted frames 1,2 and 3 are always dark (on my machine).
Frame 4 is the first which renders correctly here.
Hopefully the fix gets this.
cheers, Klaus
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: bigben on July 13, 2017, 10:58:35 PM
Quote from: KlausK on July 13, 2017, 08:10:26 PM
This issue is NOT related to rendering out sequences.
In my tests I tried sequences and single frame rendering.
Using the scene file bigben posted frames 1,2 and 3 are always dark (on my machine).
Frame 4 is the first which renders correctly here.
Hopefully the fix gets this.
cheers, Klaus

I had also experienced the issue with single frame renders AFTER it appeared in the sequence renders, with still renders matching the sequence renders, so there may have been a common tipping point. Both worked normally for me after rebooting. Klaus' specs are much better than mine so there may be something other than resources running out and the dark/light rendering matched my renders.
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: KlausK on July 14, 2017, 01:20:42 PM
Yeah, I have to correct my earlier statement.
I deleted the animation from the camera and rendered single frames.
Except for the fact that the camera jumps to nowhere-land after deleting the animation
(I thought going to frame 1 would leave it in this position) the first frame  rendered "normal", meaning, with light green reflection.
Changing the camera position again, rendering, changing camera position, rendering and so on and so forth always got the render "normal".
Well, enough debugging, hopefully the "soon to be released update" is to be released soon  ::)
Cheers, Klaus
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: Oshyan on July 14, 2017, 05:18:48 PM
Perhaps, but you should also be aware that there is always variability in the GI, even when things aren't animated. The lower your GI settings the higher the impact of this variability. Depending on settings, successive renders of the exact same settings can still have differences, usually minor enough not to be noticed, but in some cases not so minor unfortunately. Higher GI settings usually solve this, or GI caching where appropriate (yes, even useful for still-frame rendering).

Also, although you may be seeing some *correlation* between the issue and a reboot having an effect, it is unlikely that there is *causation*, this is probably just coincidence. I can't think of why a reboot would change this, there is always variability (randomness) in the GI calculation (as well as other calculations, e.g. AA/ray-traced sampling). In other words I don't think it's actually correlated to any resource issue, which should not affect rendering in this way. If you run out of resources, rendering either crashes or gets really slow, it doesn't slowly degrade, at least not through any mechanism I'm aware of. But maybe Matt has some more deep-knowledge thoughts about it. :D

- Oshyan
Title: Re: GI problem?
Post by: bigben on July 16, 2017, 06:41:39 PM
Photoshop filling the scratch disk... Windows Explorer failing to respond  = dark renders ;).  Probably killed a few other things along the way that impacted rendering.  Note to self... don't work on global source images while using TG.