Forest Pack > Forest Pro (*)

problems with flickering

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Kai:
Hey Jona, thanks for the compliment and suggestion. I usually leave the contrast at the default setting but I will try to tweak it and see what happens. I'm still pretty new to mental ray and have a lot to learn.

This rendering is part of a larger project. This particular camera view has 3000 frames (The you tube video is only 2300, I posted it before the animation had finished rendering). The rendering is divided up into layers that I render separately and composite in combustion. The 3d tree layer is the one I've had the most trouble with. It took a full week to render on 19 rendering machines. I really need to optimize it more! It uses 9.6 GB of physical memory and about the same amount of virtual memory. Pretty much everything is 3d aside from some of the details in the aerial photo and some some billboard plants.

I organize my layers as follows from top to bottom:
3d trees and ponds
striping
cars and buildings
road and bridge model
docks in the river water
dtm (digital terrain model)
river water

I've been rendering out to rpf files so that I can do some color correction by object and material id.
I'm curious if other people use this kind of a layered approach or would you just render everything together?

jonavark:
You are approaching it the best way. The only way to do it actually.

Some scenes are hard to split into layers. Those are the nasty ones.

1 week on 19 machines sounds about right. Don't feel bad about how hard it is. ALL renderers induce flicker from GI/FG calcs. It is the Holy Grail of rendering as far as I am concerned. I have even lost a few jobs because I simply could not get rid of the flicker in the time I had to deliver animations.

With your 19 machines you probably only spent a couple hundred dollars on power. A commercial render farm would have cost anywhere from $1500 to $4000. Imagine paying for THAT and then seeing flicker.

What I wouldn't give for a render engine that rendered animations exactly as I see them in stills. I am not alone in that wish.

I thought your render looked very good otherwise.

UR4208:
Hello Kai. I have a similar scene with both animated objects and moving cameras. My forest is flickering when animated. I'm using 3ds max design 2013 with mentalray and Hq plants 1 and 2 with color tint. Which mentalray render settings should I use. My resolution output shall be 1920×1080. I've also installed Thorsten Hartman's render optimizer with the same settings as yours.

Jørn

Kai:
If you have determined that the trees are flickering because of undersampling and not final gather, then use unified sampling at the highest settings you can manage. I've gotten good results with
min: 4
max: 256
quality: 3
cutoff: .025

This usually works for me at the expense of very long render times. I've also been experimenting more with a render pass/compositing workflow. You can minimize flickering with some blurring or rendering shadows separately and compositing on top of a diffuse rendering.

You also need to consider your final output. I usually output animations to windows media and you tube at no higher than 720p. video compression will hide some of the flickering that sticks out like a sore thumb in RAM player.

Kai

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