Good News: Reducing Vue Render Times

#17

[b]Looks like the problem may be solved

EDIT[/b]: I think I know what may be causing the problem. It’s similar to the moire effect.
If you have astigmatism in your eyes, you may better understand the effect of thin concentric lines crossing one another. Its the same reason you shouldn’t wear tight pin stripes or fine lined patterns for a video shoot. The lines will creap/crawl into one another.

The masts are close and behind each other. They are also parralel to one another. In a rotation at distance they either blend or blink out. The further out as the masts cross each other durring the cameras pan, the greater the problem. I am running another test that rotates and pans up close to the tower.

[img]http://www.digitalworks.8m.com/Forumpix/AA_Problems_res_compare_01.jpg[/img]

In these two shots the camera is physically moved in close to the building masts.

The biggest picture is in the closest.

#18

[b]Side By Side Comparison

>Vue Movie< 1.5 MB 640x480

Lightwave Render

>Lightwave Render< 479 kb 640x480

Good news: [/b]The strobing is not a result of the render farm. A sequence of frames rendered from the same machine delivered the same results. If you can consider that good news. That’ snot to say that there may not be issues, but this one is not related.

Bad news: The side by side movie shows that the environment is not playing a role in the effect. The model rendered in Lightwave with medium AA does not exhibit the strobing effect.

Vue has a problem with strobing and I think its a result of the AA and Blur. The lightwave test presents a clearer transition from distance. The image shows the amount of geometry that strobes from one frame to the next. Increasing the AA does not resolve the issue. The model was also using double sided sufaces and single sided surfaces.

#19

>bump<
For all the Lightwavers who are looking into the LW9/Vue5 Infinite offer going on.:slight_smile:

#20

Craig,

Those ‘cloud’ artifacts affecting the antenna look more like they could be windows media compression that occurred after the vue render.

Mick

#21

Actually the strobe is visable on the TGA sequence before rendering to video. The image inset above is sampled from the sequential TGA’s. The strobe effects vertical geometry. I posted the same effect on E-Ons site and another user produced the same result rendering the Eifel Tower. The central mast strobed. An E-On tech support suggested maximum AA to reduce the effect. It resulted in longer renders without entirely eliminating the strobe. It’s something E-On needs to get squared away.

#22

And this same thing happens with plants as well as with buildings.

Some of my dead tree plants in my desert scene were doing the same thing.
Which also made some of them, look like they were flying off the ground for
one frame render to another.

…md :slight_smile:

#23

We were considering investing in Vue for an upcoming large landscape project involving an animation, however this would be a definite show stopper. Hopefully e-on can do something about it!

#24

Well, at least for me, one of my problems I solved myself.

As for my plants flying off the ground, I finally found that there is a setting for such things, which actually now I use all the time to determine how much embedded I want objects to be, like rocks and trees and whatever, which works really well.
As for the effect of the tower poles sticking up and strobing, I have found the exact same thing and it works from one frame to the next, back and forth, and this is BEFORE I send a sequence of images to compile into an animation.
I can scroll through the frames and see that on one frame the dead tree plant off in the distance on a hill is tall, and the next frames it’s cut short while the next after that it’s back to tall again and it keeps doing this untill you either get too far away or closer up.

So, that still is a problem and like he said, it’s a verticle thing, as this doesn’t happen for sideways items.

…md :slight_smile:

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#25

Mark,
I had one instance where the plants popped up at close range as the camera slowed to a stop. I hadn’t experienced it again since the first tests. Are your plants flying off the ground at distance or at close range?

On the AA problem. Another suggestion from E-On is to increase the render output and increase AA to max then reduce the final output to the desired resolution. Yeah, I’ll do that. :rolleyes:
With things not going so well at E-On right now, I am keeping my Vue animation work on hold.

#26

I think it might of been both, but for sure, it was at farther ranges,
that much I know for sure about.
Meaning the flying plants.

Haven’t had enough time to test out the closeness of plants, rocks and other EcoSystem
items to see if they react the way you mention during an animation or not.
I’ll let ya know what I see next time I get a second to try another animation out.

I AM having issues with the still crashing for no apparent reason with the memory bit,
and this time I took screen shots to send to e-on.

…md

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#27

Hey Rich

Aside from the strobing on the masts, I am noticing a lot of GI artifacts in your render on the trees. Reducing the quality of the GI creates a lot of problems with the photon emission. That is one of the shortcomings of biased GI. I am working at film res and this is a huge problem for me as with the sampling I need to get rid of it, the render times are enormous.

Does anyone know if there is a way to bake GI into the trees? I know with rocks you can bake, but it would be useful for trees (even though they move around).

#28

I wrote a tutorial on the render settings for Vue 5 Infinite to help reduce graininess and reducing the render time. It is more for stills rather than animation, but it may help…

http://users.tns.net/~mwalter1/Vue_Render_Settings.pdf

Peggy

#29

Hi Dave - I had a heck of hard time with the strobing. It appeared no amount of AA was going to allieviate the problem. Finally a tech person at E-On suggested that I double the resolution and then res down to minimize the strobe. Not a solution in my eyes as it only lessens the issue which doesn’t resolve it, and Vue takes long enough to render. Unfortunately I don’t see GI artifacts being addressed by doubling the render resolution. Especially if you’re already working at film res.

It has been a while since I’ve run animation tests in Vue. I will update to 5.10 and see if E-On has addressed the issue.

#30

Rich,

Would it be possible to use a thicker / hazier atmosphere on your project? The haze “should” mask the strobing. Or, you could use a different model which doesn’t have the antennas / strobing parts when the building is far enough away to cause the effect. Granted this is hiding the problem and not fixing it, but flickering things call too much attention to themselves while the lack of flickering usually goes unnoticed.

Best of luck,
SirReality

#31

Jeff - I haven’t tried increasing haze or atmospheric effects as those would require altering the end look of my scene. If it can be called a solution one shouldn’t render narrow vertical elements against a high contrasting backgrounds. That could mask the strobe effect.
One of my bigger problems arose in another (unrelated) scene when I rendered a flight of WWII fighters that have vertical antenna. Vue has an achillees heal in with narrow vertical details.

I’ve updated my copy of VueInf and intend to run some tests to see if this has been resolved.

#32

Hopefull that update will help… if not could you set the antenas up to be transparent based on distance to the camera? Then they would fade-in as the camera got close enough to avoid the flickering. I know this could be done in Lightwave, but not sure how to do it in Vue.

Good luck!

#33

Hey guys.

In studios, a good technique to get better anti-alias with not much render time plus is to simply lower quality and render it in double size, then half the size afterwords. It works perfectly.

  • Jack
#34

This is from a recent email from E-on:

No Flickering in Animations Trick

If you’ve ever rendered animations of EcoSystems, you’ve surely noticed that you need to push the anti-aliasing settings quite high in order to reduce the amount of visual flickering. This flickering is caused by the enormous amount of detail inherent to the EcoSystem technology: in the distance, you could easily have several thousands of polygons for each pixel in the final image! This amount of detail is what causes the flickering.
With all the different rendering options in Vue, it’s sometimes difficult to hit the optimal balance in terms of render time vs. flickering. However, you may find the following to be a good starting point for your adjustments (keeping in mind that flicker-free rendering of detailed EcoSystems will always require long render times):
Turn off texture anti-aliasing and use systematic geometry anti-aliasing with only a few rays per pixel (typically 4 rays/pixel). This will be enough for the render engine to pick up areas where there is a lot of detail. By setting the max number of rays and the quality threshold to very high values, you will instruct the render engine to spend most of its time on these areas.

#35

rgdigital - thanks for that. I was told pretty much the same by their tech support about AA issues. I’m looking at Standard ntsc here. I know that Vue can be problamatic (stability wise) at Higher Resolutions. SO if working in HD that odubling for resolution could spell disaster. Will have to run tests on that.

On another note - Vue 6 Inf looks to deal directly with this Vue5 Inf problem out of the box. So “Maybe” less work arounds albeit the mention of looong render times.

Read under - [i][b]Flicker-Free EcoSystem Rendering Technology

[/b][/i]Vue 6 Inf Features

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#36

mmm… a little question about vue 5 & 6…
About 5, I can’t find the Advanced Animation options, so maybe it sounds stupid, but where is it?
And about 6, these kind of problems with renders taking tooo looong is resolved?