Flickering Maya Oceans

[acidream]

Instead of increasing the max samples to 3, leave it at 2 and decrease the contrast threshold to a lower value. It defaults to 0.1, but something between 0.02 and 0.06 is usually sufficient. It will increase the render times, but usually not as much as increasing the samples.

[wizzackr]

Just been playing around with some ocean animations and having problems with distant flickering. Yeah I know, up the sampling rate to -min 0 -max 2 and change the filter type to Guass. This works great for static images but the flickering is still there just blurred.

So i up samples again 1 and 3, which made a small improvement with terrible render times.
Tried increasing bump blur to no effect and reflection blur didnt seem to make any difference either. Its certainly distance related because up close it looks great.

Any suggestions?

Had the same problem a while ago. Not in production, though, i was while toying around in my spare time. Even at 1/3 or at 0/2 with contrast thresholds of 0.05 the flicker was quite strong. I am wondering if a distance-based falloff for the wave-height or something would help instead of having to increase the sampling... Never got around to testing it though.

[Aikiman]

found the solution thanks to another CGmember. It is distant based on the cameras z direction and increasing bump blur on the ocean shader the further away from the camera the ocean is.

How to? Quote from other thread

In the Hypershade create a sampler info node and set range node
connect PointCameraZ (SI) to Value X (SR)

set value allows you to convert numeric data from one range to another. In this case we convert distance in maya units (large) into bump value range (small)

in Hypershade connect setRange1.outValueX to oceanShader1.bumpBlur

adjust setRange values to be
(first Column)
33.000
.050
-200.000
-33.000
(all the rest are 0)
**Important since mayas camera are created facing -z the point camera returns a negative value. so use negative numbers for distance to camera

Use ipr to test different numbers as numbers will change with scale of scene

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.