Can Max's renderer really be that bad!?!

[timsvw]

I don't use max but have you ever gone into your graph editor and checked for keys on your lights. It just seems odd to me that if you rerender one frame it would screw it up. Sometimes in Lightwave if you use radeosity you can get a flicker in your animation render. But my suggestion would be to check your lights.

-Tim

[sforsyth]

timsvw: thanks for getting back to me. Unfortunately, it's not that, there are no weird keys being set for specific frames or anything. In fact, it's all very simple. I'm not using radiosity or any light plugins, I'm not animating any of the lights in any way (their parameters or position), and even the camera is motionless.

Must just be a totally unreliable renderer. It'd drive you mad.

[joconnell]

Absolutely not, it's one of the most reliable renders around. It does have limitations in terms of things like supersampling / controlable anti aliasing, it's a slow raytracer compared to vray brazil and arnold and its motion blur sin't the best but it does a pretty reliable job in most cases. You're not gonna get the same amount of polys runnig through it as renderman and you won't get the same speed as some of the other renderers available for it but it's better than a lot of built in renderers of other packages. As for your problem then It sounds like you're having problems with shadow maps - trying increasing the size of your map resolution and playing with the sample range (bigger = softer shadows).

Give this a go and see if it solves the problem - have a play around with the bias settings if the contact area where your object meets the ground looks a bit wrong in the shadow.

Hope this helps.

[sforsyth]

Hi John,
And thanks for getting back to me. Yeah, I'm a fan of the renderer in Max myself, having seen it improve over the versions since way back in v1.1. Having said that, I've never really used it for serious high quality animations before, it's generally been stills or small animations designed for web delivery. Anyway, as I said, I've been more than happy with it. (Despite a lot of Lightwave users trying to tell me otherwise, users who seemed to think that because Lightwave's renderer used to be better, that it therefore automatically was for every future implementation aswell - god, am I going to start a flame war here?)

The bias settings and shadow map sizes were among the first things I checked, but it's not so much the flickering of shadows, (which I'm sure could be solved with some closer attention to the lights), as the complete non-rendering of shadows on certain frames. I.e Only frame 43 in a specific animation will just not render shadows.

Mad. I'm going to have to look into it closer, I just wanted to check that no-one else has experienced the same problem, plus I was having a really bad day and sometimes it's easier to ask someone else rather than give yourself more headaches (ie take the easy way out).

Anyway, thanks for all your help,

[TimWoods]

ive had problems with duff versions of max and viz (usually common with warez). Its more noticable when you net render. Aparently there are different service pack releases, and also the processor type can effect the rendering.
So its either a problem with max, try re-installing it. We use 5.1 on several machines and dont currently have any problems now that all software is new and the same. (legal)

(sometimes i find turing fast adaptive anti aliasing in the raytracer setting on, seems to iron out most problems, render time suffers tho.)
sorry i cant be more help.
:shrug:

[sforsyth]

Thanks Tim,
Unfortunately, it's not anything to do with an illegal version of Max, this is a fully paid up version of Max 4.2.

I'm still looking at why it's happening (finding it hard to find the time to do this though), I think it's just a matter of redoing the entire lights setup.

There is raytracing in the scene, so I might look into turning on the fast adaptive anti aliasing as you suggested. Thanks for the tip!

[Max4d]

Hey dude

I must say i have no idea why you have those problems with an animation. They never occurred to me.

About the Max render, you might not believe it but it’s just as good as the Brazil render system. I once made an image with special lightning and rendered them in max and in Brazil and Max just looked as good. May people think Max render sucks , but with serious tweaking and lightning knowledge it is a very powerful render system. Don’t underestimate it. It can realy amaze you, that’s for sure.

Greetz Max4d

[michaelcomet]

Hey,

I know exactly what you are talking about as I have had that too...where suddenly different parts of the shadows seem to be on or off or small areas of the image will flicker bright for a frame here or there.

This seemed to happen when I was really pushing the RAM limit on my system. One thing you can try is to actually change the shadow map res/size for your lights.

I never got around to retesting this, but I think a friend of mine at Discreet told me that increasing the shadow map size might cause it to fix itself since the res would be higher and thus less prone to differences frame to frame... Dunno if that will actually work or not, but might be worth a shot.

and yeah i was getting this all with local renders on one machine with r4.2 also.

[sforsyth]

Well thank god for that, I'm not alone! Thanks for letting me know. I'm using 4.2 on a local machine aswell, and have 512MB of RAM. Not sure if it's a RAM problem though...

I've already tried to increase the shadow map size, the only thing left to do is increase them HUGELY. I'll give it a go and see anyway, though I'm seriously considering dropping or relighting the scene anyway.

Anyway, like I said, thanks for letting me know.

By the way Michael, thanks for the tutorials on your site too, they're great. :thumbsup: You're a veritable pillar of the Max community.

Max4D: like I said before, I really like the Max renderer aswell, it's not about not getting nice renders, it's purely single frames of animations losing shadows or getting them rendered incorrectly.

[michaelcomet]

Yeah I know...I don't think it is RAM either...because as you said both of us were able to try to re-render teh same frame...and it still renders with the error.

My friend was pretty sure it was a shadow map issue of it not being accurate enough....but I still think it may be something else...tho I dunno what.

In the end I had opted to just move on, since I didn't want to try to wait to figure it out....but playing with some of the shadow settings might help... I was able to eventually figure out what light it was. Once you know which light it is, try playing with the settings for that light...

I'd be curious to see if you can figure it out. I hope so!

Thanks for the comments!

[sforsyth]

Okay, well I'll keep you posted if I do find out. As I said, I'm not sure though, as I may have to just drop the entire scene and I've been considering relighting it anyway.

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