Flickering Foliage

[himalofa]

I know this has been discussed before and I have read all the posts I can find but my foliage still flickers. With detail at 1 and AA at 4 it flickers to such a degree that the anim is unuseable. I have been using the xfrog birch and pine that come with TTG2 and they both flicker. Any suggestions.

I'm beginning to wonder how many people do animations as every one I have attempted has been a headache. First the black triangles - thankfully now fixed, then GI flicker - glad to hear it is being worked on, and now these trees flickering.

[Matt]

If your objects have details smaller than a pixel, you will need pretty high AA values to animate without flicker.

Is this with "ray trace objects" enabled in v2.1? That will help, but you still need high AA settings.

I would also choose a soft pixel filter.

Matt

[Kadri]

If your objects have details smaller than a pixel, you will need pretty high AA values to animate without flicker.

Is this with "ray trace objects" enabled in v2.1? That will help, but you still need high AA settings.

I would also choose a soft pixel filter.

Matt

Matt i think it would be good if the most appropriated settings for animation are attached on the  " Render setting recommendations " topic .
Maybe they are not same on all the settings but it would be still helpful  ?

Kadri.

[Oshyan]

I am doing an animation now with detailed foliage and I've gone up to AA 12 (actually in large part for high quality motion blur), but customized the sampling to 1/64 with a 0.25 noise threshold (or thereabouts). Seems to be working fairly well so far, a reasonable balance of render time and good quality (except where there's a lot of motion blur on a reflective surface - yeek!). I'm rendering at 720p though. I would at least try AA 6 or 8 for your purposes. Adaptive (on by default) can help a lot with being able to use higher AA without huge render times. Also detail 1 is probably not necessary and will very likely be blurred away by compression in your final video output, even with a good video codec and high bitrate. I'd try 0.75, you might even get away with less.

Tuning detail settings for various purposes can be challenging, especially as changes like raytraced objects are introduced. The raytraced objects function changes the needed AA settings quite a lot (generally lower AA is needed actually).

- Oshyan

[himalofa]

Thanks,

I will give these suggestions a try and let you know.

[Oshyan]

You should also make sure Detail Blending is on and, as Matt said, a softer AA filter might be good. As with the higher detail, sharp AA filter results will probably just be blended away. Narrow Cubic and Mitchel-Netrevali are usually my favorites for stills, but they're relatively sharp by default. You might try Cubic B-Spline. It's quite soft for stills, but should look nice in motion.

- Oshyan

[himalofa]

No joy so far. I have Detail .75 AA 12, ray trace objects on, object render quality Ultra, customized sampling as suggested, detail blending at 1, and cubic B-spline for the pixel filter. The effect is most noticeable in the distance where there is little movement and the trees just seem to shimmer. Does the frame size make any difference? amd what about vertex jittering and AA bloom? What is soft clip? I feel I am just trashing around in the dark.

I have attached 2 frames if you flick between them you will see my problem.

[Matt]

That is very surprising. I wouldn't expect to see anywhere near that much aliasing with AA 12. Can you please send us your .tgd? You can email support@planetside.co.uk

I wouldn't customise the pixel sampler until you've found an AA preset that renders acceptably noise-free. I might tweak the settings afterwards to find a faster way of achieving the same quality.

[himalofa]

sent.

[Oshyan]

I've since found a little bit of seemingly similar flicker/noise in a small part of my HD frames. It's a bit dark in the current segment which may be making it harder to see in my case. So perhaps my settings are not optimal. For now they are working well enough, but if I find the noise to become objectionable (after compression to motion video format) in later frames, I'll just adjust as I go. I've done mid-frame AA changes before without significant ill effect (although going from adaptive to non-adaptive or vice versa will be a more dramatic and noticeable shift).

- Oshyan

[himalofa]

I am beginning to wonder if this is a problem with 2.1 Has anyone got any comparative renders of the same scene with the 2 versions? My problem is with distant vegitation that does not have much apparent motion. Nearby trees that move by more than their own dimensions look ok but I think that is an optical property as the eye finds it harder to spot the differences. i will do more testing.

[Oshyan]

The only difference with 2.1 would be the new Raytraced rendering mode for objects. You can disable this and rendering should be the same as in the original public releases for objects. I would guess the flicker would remain, but may change in character.

- Oshyan

[RedSquare]

I who know nothing was just wondering, is this anything to do with variations in the light catch between frames or is it cooked on the first frame?

[Matt]

RedSquare, the flickering here is a separate issue.