Mountain FlyBy 2

[cyphyr]

Hi Gang
Happy New Year to you all

Here's another attempt at the Mountain Flyby scene, its still exhibiting the same issues as before. I followed Oshyans advice and increased the detail to 7 and the GI quality to 2/2. I moved the sun higher and to the left of the camera path rather than directly behind the camera. Its 1000 frames long now so the animation itself is smoother but I'm still getting the shadow popping. Any ideas how to get round this, its only a very simple PF landscape so I don't see how that could be simplified. Comments and Critique always welcome.
Heres the link http://vimeo.com/2688899

Richard

[darthvader]

Very nicely done

[Marcos Silveira]

Amazing!!!! Loved everything!!!

[old_blaggard]

Nice job! Pity about the continuing shadow troubles....

[Mr_Lamppost]

Hmm. I had some problems with "Popping" shadows when I made some animation tests a while ago, I didn't keep the results.

That apart; Nicely done.

[Saurav]

Great camera movement.

[Hetzen]

Really good Cypher. Excellent movement on the camera to follow the terrain at a constant speed.

Just a thought about those shadows. Have you got a distance shader turning stuff off before they have no influence on the scene? Sorry if it's been suggested before.

[cyphyr]

Bump, any news whether this is a fixable problem?
Richard

[cyphyr]

Hi Just to let you know I have re-rendered some of the problem sequances at detail 1, AA 11 and the shadow clipping still happens at the same time and in the same place, exactly.
Richard

[Mandrake]

Maybe just use soft shadows for now, may be less noticeable, till someone figures it out. Looks awesome though.

[Volker Harun]

How large is the area covered by the CamPath?
I was thinking of creating 1 or more heightfields and to replace the PF with this/these heightfields.
Even if this may not be the solution for your problem, it will render faster and gives you more potential on quality settings.

I like Mandrake's soft-shadow idea.
Another point to be considered is to replace the sun with a lightsource - far far away. You'll have to increase its radius to take advantage of soft shadows in this case. Check this: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5377.msg56335#msg56335

Instead of pushing GI relative detail you could rather go for higher sample quality. If necessary anymore.

Hope I was able to help.
Volker

[ian]

Hi Guys.

I am having the same problem with the popping shadows. I have tried soft shadows, played with their quality settings, GI relative and sample quality settings and no joy. Any more ideas?

Cheers
Ian

[cyphyr]

I did wonder about using a Heightfield shader in some way, but there will always be a limit on detail level available with Herghtfields. I think BigBen had some luck combining different scale DEM's of NZ effectively.  Ideally an "Off screen Optimisation" slider would be most useful, I know there will be a render hit but its that or not getting the job done lol.
Richard

[Volker Harun]

The detail of the heightfield is up to you ... you have two options.
The size of the heightfield in metres and the size in pixel.
Depending on the campath you may need 2 heightfields, each 2000x2000m and 4096x4096 pixel under the campath and 2 heightfields, one to the right and one to left ... sized 2000x4000 and 1024x2048 pixel.
Of course you do not have overhangs and so on ...

[inkydigit]

very nicely done!...look forward to seeing how this progresses!