CGTalk - strange flickering shadows after render?

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Tom N.

03-04-2003, 06:37 PM

I have a scene of a boy who is sorta checking out a crash site that hes found, and its a closeup of his upper body from a front-ish view, and hes just sorta moving his head and torso from one side to the other checking out the area, and when I render the scene I get this annoying flickering all over his body. Its under one eye, his waist, torso, neck... its just small square-ish looking shadows that are there for a split second on and off.

Is this just Maya's renderer being busted or is it something I overlooked? I tried different lighting, I've tried different camera angles, different resolutions.. I can't seem to fix it! any help at all is greaaatly appreciated.

-Tom N.

stunndman

03-04-2003, 06:55 PM

if you are using depth map shadows turn autofocus off (if the artifact is actually related to the depth-map shadow - you are sure on this one?)

Rudity

03-05-2003, 08:30 AM

That sounds like a depth map shadow flickering.

Screw around with settings of the dmap shadows.

If you are using directional lights turn off dmap auto focus.
The value of the dmap width focus should concentrate on everything you want casting shadows in your scene.
To see what the value should be throw in a spot light, increase the cone angle untill it covers what you want and use that value for the dmap width focus in your directional light.
Or just use a spot light.

You can also incease the dmap filter size. To make really soft shadows turn down the dmap resolution and put up the filter size.
This is hard to control the flickering but tweaking the dmap width focus and bias can fix it.

Its alot of tweaking and learning.
It took me a while

Mattrne

03-05-2003, 06:25 PM

also, if possible turn off the casts shadow attribute for your groundplane orany other unnecessary large geometry.

Tom N.

03-05-2003, 07:43 PM

Hey guys thanks, you were right it was depth map shadows, i just had to bump up my Dmap Res a little bit, it was on 512 or something.. no wonder.

Thanks a lot everyone

-Tom N.

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