Hi frequency flicker of atmosphere on tree populations

Started by JasonA, January 06, 2012, 10:51:20 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

JasonA

HI all,

Im working on some camera animations flying over a dense forest population of x-frog trees.  The problem that comes up is this hi frequency flicker thats happening in the atmosphere is very distracting.  And it really only shows up on (or in rather) the tree populations.  Its like a constant buzz thats happening and the problem seems more noticeable in the distant horizon than up close.  The atmosphere settings are almost default except the samples.  If I disable the atmosphere and run test renders the problem is gone.

Im using what I thought was appropriate production render settings but I just cant get rid of this buzz noise flickering.  Right now im using Detail 0.8, AA 8, prepass 1,1,8.   In the atmosphere dialog im using a quality of 100 samples and jitter is set to 4.  And finally I have the detail on all the tree populations set to 'ultra'....  Still lots of buzz.  My pixel filter is set to default values (Narrow Cubic etc).  My rendertimes are 1hr/frame @ hd720.

I'm not sure im attacked the problem in the right way and trial and error rendering is taking too long.  Is there a common way to neutralize this atmospheric flicker without across the board crazy ridiculous settings?

Cheers,
Jason




cyphyr

The easiest way to get rid of atmosphere GI flicker is to use fill lights.

Disable the Enviro Light node and set the GI relative detail, GI sample quality and GI prepass padding to "0".

Add in new sunlights, 3 or 4 should do, disable their shadow casting and glow in atmosphere and set their strength to about 0.1 (it will vary on your scene) try to use differing values for fill lights, 0.1, 0.15, 0.075 for example and slightly (very) alter each lights colour.

This may not be suitable for your purpose but it can work in many cases. Changing the quality of the models won't do much if anything to render time or quality.

Hope this helps

Richard

ps 100 is VERY high for an atmosphere (unless you have Ray Trace Atmosphere disabled) I rarely find reason to go over 24 or sometimes 36. If you can see very little atmosphere you may be able to go much lower still.
www.richardfraservfx.com
https://www.facebook.com/RichardFraserVFX/
/|\

Ryzen 9 5950X OC@4Ghz, 64Gb (TG4 benchmark 4:13)

Oshyan

It would be helpful to see at least a still frame of the sequence in question to be sure that the problems you describe are what I think they are. But with the settings you describe I think it's very likely you're dealing with changes in the Global Illumination solutions between frames. Your GI settings, if I read it correctly, are very low (1,1,8). As cyphyr mentions, removing GI entirely is the surest way to eliminate that flicker for now, but you may prefer the GI result. In that case you would want to try some higher GI settings, something like 2,6,16. This will increase render time, but you can compensate by lowering atmosphere samples considerably. Unless your scene is particularly dark or high contrast, it's likely you won'd need more than 16 or 32 atmosphere samples, regardless of whether you're using Raytrace Atmosphere (RT). Also I don't think higher jitter than 1 is useful (not certain). I suspect you may have made those settings on the assumption that the atmosphere itself was responsible for the flicker, but it is very likely the GI as I said, especially if the problem persists even with those high atmosphere sample levels.

In the upcoming 2.4 release we will have some features for taking care of GI flicker.

- Oshyan

Matt

In addition to what Oshyan said, for animations I would recommend setting the pixel filter to Cubic B-Spline (Soft) or Mitchell-Netravali (a good compromise between sharp and soft). Narrow Cubic isn't very good for anti-aliasing, but it is the default setting because it gives crisper textures that are similar to what people were used to seeing in older versions (Box filter, not good) and it also renders slightly quicker than the high quality filters.

The pixel filter won't solve the GI issues but it will help anti-aliasing.

Set atmosphere jitter to 1.

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.