Flickering Terrain; trees fine; time an issue

#1

Hey all,

This is long, so, sorry in advance, but got a bit of a situation. I’m rendering out an animation of a forest flyover. Tons of trees in the ecosystem. I was originally doing test renders to make sure the tree’s didn’t flicker (this is a revisit of a previous project where the tree’s flickered like crazy!!!).

So, the tree’s are fine, can’t really find any flickering (and if there is, it isn’t visible enough to be a problem). But now the mountains on the landscape are flickering. It seems to be most visible on parts that receive direct sunlight (if you notice, the mountain in mid frame that’s completely covered in shadows is fine).

Here is my test animation (flickering most prevalent half way through on the upper mountains)

Atmosphere settings:

Render Settings[b]

Settings that don’t have a screen cap:[/b]

Sky, fog and haze quality slider set to -1

Rendering in C4D with geometry anti-aliasing with an animation filter (to soften it)

Animation rendered using C4D sampling, but Vue’s object anti-aliasing is set to 6min 8max. If that’s the problem I can afford to switch over to Vue sampling and go a little higher with those… but not much (got 3 other projects to revisit in the next few weeks).

In regards to bump map on terrain: The rock texture I’m using has a bump depth of 10, then it’s mixed (at a scale of 99) with my grass/ground material. I know this sounds extreme, but initial tests made the rocks look good and not like a flat gray/black/brown noise pattern. Also, my main terrain is 13x13km and 1.6km high, so an extreme scale on the rocks seemed appropriate… but you tell me, I’m a c4d guy first and foremost:)

While I’m here: Even though I’m using xstream, other elements of the scene (a city and some space ships) are actually gonna be rendered in Vray so I can take advantage of super fast gi and motion blur. Any tips in regard to making things like atmosphere and depth match up are appreciated:) Oh, and multi-passing the vue elements will require a completely seperate render in Vue since the multi-pass results are horrible when rendered through xstream.

thanks so much,
kvb

#2

Try this.

Double click on your camera and uncheck the AutoExposure setting.

Tell us, if this fixed the flickering

#3

Before I do (12 hrs per test btw) does it matter that the camera used to render was a c4d camera not associated with the Vue scene? I’m not sure how xstream handles native cameras when they’re set as the render view.

Do they adopt the main Vue camera? I’ve noticed that no matter how many camera’s I have in a Vue scene, there’s always only 1 camera imported with the file, so this is leading me to think that native cameras will adopt Vue cam settings.

Let me know, and I’ll work toward a test

thanks,
kvb

#4

Well, it’s not the auto exposure on the camera. Throughout all the scene files for this project, none of my cameras had auto exposure on.

Could it be because my terrain is procedural?

I’ll look into that for the time being.

kvb

#5

Im sorry to hear you are having trouble with flickering animations.

Thats a wide spread problem with Vue, at least i have read many complaints. Over at www.cornucopia3d.com theres a good form-thread started by david martin that might be able to help you. As much as i understood the flickering is a render setting (to be more clear, a anti alias thing).

Maybe looking there might help you to solve your problem.

http://www.cornucopia3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5649

#6

Thanks Chris, I’ve read that thread. I know about the on-going flicker problems with Vue (v5 xstream beta tester here). I figured, if I was able to keep 3billion+ tree polys (with breeze) flicker free, yet my mountains do, I must have screwed up something obvious. I think it might have been my rock material (strong bump and ridiculous scale).

I’ve been held back from doing anymore test renders due to my latest problem with export, once I get that figured out and get the rest of my animation done I’ll be able to test my final camera move.

thanks again,
kvb

#7

Your advanced quality settings are really low (15% in the render options), also your light balance is 60% towards the sun, this increases contrat between light and shadow, and as the camera moves, the light/shdow transitions happens many times may increase flicker. Also, what material are the rovk and grass mats? Vue stock mats or your own? Some materials may flicker more due to the bump production function used. For example, simple noises and basic repeaters flicker more. And the higher the bump, the more flickering. You may need to use some texture AA in this case.

#8

Thanks for the advice Bruno. That’s exactly the type of info I was looking for:) And it all makes a lot of sense.

I’m going to go through my rock material and put this info to use, and maybe bring that light balance down a bit.

thanks again,
kvb

#9

Let us know how it goes, so we can continue the war against flickering!

#10

I hope I can do that, but all my progress is still halted by bugs, and if tech support doesn’t respond with an actual answer within the next hour… well, I’m gonna end up missing my deadline. E-on’s tech support has definately gotten quicker… but as far as actual usefulness… not quite there yet, unfortunately.

This is not the first time that Vue has failed me on account of unforeseen bugs, and this will be the second time those issues have caused me to miss a deadline. If that happens… I’m gonna have to bury vue in a pine box out in the backyard.

Here’s to hopin they come through for me :beer:

kvb

EDIT: Forgot today is Saturday (stupid Tues-Sat schedule), so they had already failed me yesterday. Memorial services will be held on April 1st for those who wish to attend…

#11

Oh, sorry to hear about those bugs! Anything we can do to help you out?
Mind you, I’m going to bed now, so won’t be of much help for the next 8 hours!

#12

Thanks Bruno, you’re certainly being more helpful than tech support:)

Once I realized that tech support was not gonna come through for me, I got to work on a workaround. I made the terrain in c4d with the terrain primitive object, made it the large plateau I needed and exported it as an obj. Brought that into Modo and sculpted it up, baked in a subdivision of 1 and exported as obj. Imported it into Vue (crossing my fingers cuz, this is 1 million real polys… vue don’t like real polys…) and omg!!! it worked… it imported and there it is… in all it’s glorious detail.

Now I’m finally back where I was 1 week ago… except I don’t have a huge bug staring me in the face.

I know I’ve over-reacted a bit about the whole “buring vue in the backyard” thing, I won’t be ditching it completely. If I need the random plant model or custom sky, I’ll export/render some out, but I can’t rely on it as a production tool anymore. It’s an overpriced asset creation tool to me now.

thanks again,
kvb

#13

In Vue’s defense, you wouldn’t have been able to import such a big model into Vue before…So there’s improvement somewhere,lol!

#14

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