reflective mia materials in animation

[commander_cool]

Your flicker problem is definitely due to the Fast interpolation reflections. We had huge problems with that where I work. It doesn't work in animation. Same thing with the round corners by the way.

I'm not sure I understood your question about the chrome, but anyway... for chrome, there's an interesting trick I use. You can lower the glossiness of your reflection to get the specular you want and lower the glossy samples all the way to 0. When you lower the glossiness, you usually need to increase the number of samples to get a clean blurry reflection. But here, you want the strong highlight with a sharp reflection. When you lower the glossy samples to 0, it gives you that sharp reflection, without considering the glossiness parameter.

[Arcon]

omg lol. i thought it could be that but didn't think maya developers were stupid enough to include yet another major feature that couldn't be used in animation.... or i guess its mainly the MI side of development, FG/GI was pretty aweful like this when it first came out. seems sometimes they forget that maya is an ANIMATION package, lol.

it would've been good if they mentioned this in the release notes though.... i'm guessing Interpolated Refraction won't work either? thanks for your reply anyway :)

[djx]

It doesn't work in animation. Same thing with the round corners by the way.
What problems does round-corners have with animation? Is it more than aliassing artifacts?

-- David

[djx]

double post :shrug:

[commander_cool]

Round corners flicker, even with pretty high AA settings.

And for the interpolation, I was very deceived when I realised that it was not working in animation, but I just started testing Vray for Maya and it has a similar interpolation tool in the vraymtl and the docs says it flickers in animation too, so...

I also noted that the mia_material is a total rip off of the vraymtl, but that's another story.

[Arcon]

..so in conclusion how am i supposed to get blurred reflections with the mia_material...? this is a pretty common surface requirement and might force me to go back to maya blinns lol. unless there's some other mr custom shader i can connect...

[slipknot66]

you can still use the mia_material for blurry reflections, its faster compared to phong or blinn.
Also you can use ctrl_rays to separate the blurry reflections from FG.

[commander_cool]

You decrease the glossiness of your reflection and increase the samples. It's costly, but the mia_material is still the best solution for anything blurry in maya. But you still need to be careful, because extreme settings will kill the render time. If you use it well, you won't think about going back to blinns.


If you do an interior scene, here's two things I realised some weeks ago.

1) When I render an animation of an interior scene, I often get flicker and I need to increase the anti-aliasing to something like 0 2 and 0.5 of contrast or even 1 3 and 0.5 of contrast. You need to understand that when you increase the AA, you get rid of the stair effect on the edge of the modeling, yes, but you also reduce the contrast of the grains that could be created by blurry reflections with not enough samples or even by area lights with low settings.

2) Increasing the sampling of an area light is more costly than increasing the samples of a shader.

Now, I always assume that my final AA settings will be 1 3 with 0.5 of contrast to get rid of the flicker. I usually set the area lights to something like 25 samples, not more. Before, I used to set them as high as 64 or even 81 samples to get rid of the noise I got with low AA settings(while doing preview renders)... :eek: I didn't know that AA was getting rid of a big part. And I set the samples of the blurry reflection as high as it needs(but I still try to stay below 16).

You wouldn't believe how faster the rendering part is. And it's still almost grain free.

Another way to speed up rendering, you can disconnect the shadowshader of every non-transparent mia_material from the shading engine. Looks like there's a bug with that in Maya.

[lukeharris]

Thanks for these tips, they're great.

I'm working on my university major project animation, it's set in a bedroom. Would it be a bad idea to use mia_materials for pretty much everything? They're so flexible. In all my tests they look fantastic, but they're just tests; are they a safe bet for a render heavy 4 minute animation?

[Bitter]

Interpolation was actually NOT intended for animations. Take a look at other things here: http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/2007/11/more-hidden-gems-miaenvblur-gloss.html#links

[ctrl.studio]

Now, I always assume that my final AA settings will be 1 3 with 0.5 of contrast to get rid of the flicker. you mean 0.05 as spatial contrast, right ?

max

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