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
I would guess this would happen if the model quality in the population node is not set to its highest setting.
Rivhard
where do you change the quality setting of the population?
sorry just found it!
I will try that
Many thanks!
no success , still moving about...but less then before.
I have the highest setting
Just flick the images in the win browser
Matt once said something about the Detail Blending setting for animations - http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2290.msg23827#msg23827
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...
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.
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
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
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?
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...
Did you ever up your value for Detail Blending?
Can you upload a clip of you population node?
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?
Is the flickering exposure, or is it still a problem with objects having parts appearing/disappearing? If it's "exposure" then this is a GI issue. The calculation of GI will change from frame to frame. Increasing the GI blur radius should alleviate this although I haven't tested the effect that this setting has on renders yet.
You don't have to use a distance shader although restricting the population to just those objects influencing the rendered image will help reduce the amount of RAM used to render the image. From earlier tests though this won't save any time in the populating process as this takes the same amount of time even if no objects are created (also not tested in the current version)... and yes you plug it into the density shader of the population.
I have a thought for a simpler "through the lens" mask to include some padding around the frame for objects protruding (or casting shadows) into the frame. I'll post that later. Running a small render test at the moment.
Ok I think I found the major problem, there must be something wrong within my ojects.
Basically they randomly switch themself on and off, the only way to reduce this is to have a very high objet spacing, I put 40.
Don't know if anyone else has created animations with lots of vegetation before but in case you did let me know if you had the same problem
Cheers to all for now
I've never seen that happen. Many people (myself included) re-export their objects through Poseray. The obj output from this porgram fixes many problems with objects.
I've run quite a lot of animations with millions of trees and tight object spacing. Where did the tree objects you're using come from? You might want to try Ben's suggestion of exporting through PoseRay as it can fix a lot of object-related issues.
For general settings to get flicker-free trees, I would use main detail of at least 0.7 (I have made good-looking flicker-free animations at this level), population quality at High or Very High. Other detail settings should matter much less, at least for flicker issues and population quality specifically (e.g. you don't need to be as concerned about atmosphere quality, etc.). As Ben mentioned there is also GI flickering which can occur. Raising the GI Blur Radius to 100-300 should solve this.
You should also make sure there are no alpha problems or other issues with your models. The population system itself works very well and will give good results, provided the source models are setup well for TG2.
- Oshyan
Yes if it is so there is certainy somthing wrong with my trees.
I will try your sggestions...
Thanks to all... I will let you know...