Quote from: JimB on January 13, 2007, 07:58:06 PM
A note about animation: GI affecting clouds/atmosphere leads to every frame 'flickering' in the clouds. It looks like the GI is recalculated per frame and is not being baked into the clouds. This really is something Planetside needs to sort out to maintain the same quality of imagery in animation as seen in stills, as the final look is not as realistic and murkier.
I have used GI in clouds on a number of real productions recently, involving lots of cloud, and GI flickering has not been a problem. A
GI sample quality value of 3 is sometimes good enough. Rarely is more than 5 or 6 needed. It increases render times, but not by a great deal. I know that it probably depends on other factors, and some scenes will be more stubborn.
EDIT: Any time you have a scene that flickers even with high GI settings, please let me take a look.
The main source of flickering that I have found is the cloud layers' Acceleration Caches. I need to set them all to "None" to prevent flickering. This is completely independent of GI though.
I plan to implement GI baking this year.