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General => Terragen Animation => Topic started by: sboerner on May 07, 2016, 01:31:38 PM

Title: First animation attempt
Post by: sboerner on May 07, 2016, 01:31:38 PM
First attempt at animation and I'm looking for some expert advice. The rendering is about 1/3 complete, just a simple orbit. Overall quality is set at 8.5 with AA at 3. Motion blur is disabled (not sure why I did that, to be honest). Atmosphere samples are set to 64.

https://vimeo.com/165699665 (https://vimeo.com/165699665)

I'm seeing some flickering in the ground cover, and also some intermittent variations in the shadow areas where the geometry is nearly parallel to the light source. Here is a place where a splash of sunlight occurs in a single frame (clearly visible in the animation). There are other instances, espcially along the terminator of the main shadow here.

[attach=1]

Is this a quality setting issue? Or something else?

Any suggestions for improving the overall quality would be much appreciated – thanks.

Steve
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: Kadri on May 07, 2016, 01:48:49 PM

Have a look at this thread:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,20245.0.html
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: sboerner on May 07, 2016, 09:56:49 PM
Many thanks. That looks like it could be the same or similar issue. I'll run some test renders and will be back.
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: sboerner on May 08, 2016, 08:53:55 PM
That was it. Changing Ray detail region to 360 degree detail seems to have taken care of the shadow popping. I rendered out a few individual frames at the "highest" setting, then backed it off to "optimal" for this test animation. The flashing areas and flickering shadow terminator are gone now.

There were a few other bits of info in that thread . . . so for the test animation I used Animation Check and enabled GI caching. I'm sure these also contributed to the nicer quality of the new animation.

There is still some flickering in the highly detailed areas of the grass and scrub, and trees. I realize now that an AA setting of 3 is probably too low, and have increased that to 7 for a new test before messing with anything else.

Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: Kadri on May 08, 2016, 10:43:44 PM

Nice :) I hope the new AA will get rid of that flicker.
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: sboerner on May 12, 2016, 12:03:18 PM
Thanks. I've been gradually increasing the AA and Detail settings and rendering short frame sequences. Current AA is 14, Detail is 0.85. Atmosphere still at 64, and First sampling level is 1/16. Rendering is starting to get expensive and there is still a noticeable flicker in certain areas of the frame.

I'm falling into the trap of increasing everything in the hope that something good will come of it. Need to get past that and develop a deeper understanding of the relationships between the Pixel Sampler settings (AA, first sampling level, pixel noise threshold), the Render Extra tab settings (detail blending, pixel filter), and Atmosphere quality.

I'm sure most of this is explained in the forum, so I'll be reading up and will post specific questions here if I have trouble figuring it out . . .

Anything else I should be looking at? Subdiv settings? GI settings?

Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: Kadri on May 12, 2016, 01:04:27 PM

AA 14 is probably too much high but others might help more on this one.

But GI settings can be important too in animation.
Do you use blending of GI cache file in your animation? If not you should probably.
Have a look here for example what Oshyan and Matt said:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,20462.msg203139.html#msg203139


Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: sboerner on May 12, 2016, 01:50:50 PM
It seems much of the discussion regarding AA and sampling is related to objects. The areas of the frame that are flickering do not contain objects. They contain fake ground vegatation created with very small-scale displacements. Since the ray tracer doesn't render these, should I be looking at a different set of rendering parameters?

Modified to add: I'm using a GI cache with an interval of 10 frames, blending 5 for each frame of the animation.
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: Kadri on May 12, 2016, 01:56:38 PM

You might see help from others regarding this hopefully soon here.
In those aspects i am not much a help :)
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: sboerner on May 12, 2016, 02:06:03 PM
Thanks, Kadri. You've helped me narrow down the problem.

BTW your work is very impressive. Incredible detail. I take it you're familiar with the work of Chesley Bonestell? (http://www.deviantart.com/tag/bonestell (http://www.deviantart.com/tag/bonestell), among others.)
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: Kadri on May 12, 2016, 02:11:51 PM

Thanks.
Yes i know him. Classics :)
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: Kadri on May 12, 2016, 02:14:00 PM

I just saw your site link. Nice work.
I was just working on a sun animation when i saw your sun image there :)
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: sboerner on May 12, 2016, 02:28:02 PM
Thanks. I always meant to get back to that to try an animation. There are more abandoned projects lying around here than you can shake a stick at.

Send a link when you finish it. I'd like to see it.
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: Kadri on May 12, 2016, 02:32:04 PM

Hmm... Why not just now...
It is just the unfinished only Sun part and will change a little.
But i will just post it to Youtube and will post the link in this thread and in my own related thread.
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: Kadri on May 12, 2016, 02:41:36 PM

Here is it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vhdSe24qrI&feature=youtu.be

I used Lightwave for this scene. Could be done with Terragen too of course.
It is a direct Lightwave render. No postwork for now. The final scene will change.
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: sboerner on May 12, 2016, 04:18:15 PM
Looks good.
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: Kadri on May 12, 2016, 04:23:46 PM

Thanks. Working on the short movie nearly since 2 years and still adding things. This will be the final scene hopefully.
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: Oshyan on May 13, 2016, 06:04:08 PM
Issues with insufficient AA will usually show up as noise or "crawling" pixel effects, rather than "flickering", which I would characterize as a lager-scale effect. If you're really seeing "flicker", it's probably either a GI issue, or some kind of geometry shadow casting issue (out of frame geometry being calculated at too low a detail for example).

From what you describe, where you see flicker in displacement-based simulated "vegetation", I think there are 2 likely possibilities. Either your primary rendering detail is too low, causing geometry calculation differences between frames, or there may be spiky displacement that is crossing render tile boundaries and not getting rendered fully on some frames (which would be fixed by increasing Displacement Tolerance in the planet node). It would be really helpful to see a brief clip of this "flickering" to really be sure what is causing it.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: sboerner on May 13, 2016, 06:18:47 PM
Thanks for clarifying. I would say that this is a crawling pixel effect, then, not flicker. I've been running some tests with various GI settings, and those seem to help but it's not fixed yet.

I have a recent animation that I can post later this evening that should make things more clear.
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: sboerner on May 14, 2016, 12:06:05 AM
Here is a 3-second clip of two sections of the animation. In the first section the problem mainly occurs on the mountainside above the observatory structures, and to the right of the structures at about 4 o'clock. In the second section it occurs above the observatory at about 10 o'clock.

Settings were:
Quality > Detail: 0.85
Quality > AA: 14
Pixel filter: Box
Sampling > First sampling level: 1/16
Atmosphere quality: 64

It uses a GI cache with an interval of 10 frames, interpolating 5 frames.

Everything else was left at default values. (I did use the Animation Check button.)

Since I made this I've been making test renders, gradually increasing the values in the GI prepass panel (cache detail, sample quality, blur radius) and have bumped up the overall quality level to 0.9. They look promising so I'll do another 2-3 second clip.
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: Oshyan on May 14, 2016, 01:39:30 PM
It seems clear that the issue is coming from your very small-scale displacement. Unfortunately AA is not very effective at smoothing out those kinds of aliasing problems. I'm trying to think of what might actually do some good, aside from just really cranking up the detail (like to 1.5 or even 2!). I can tell you that even if you may feel you're seeing improvement from your increases in GI detail, they are *not* going to solve this issue and are only increasing render time further. The actual overall render quality may be better just due to improved GI, but the aliasing will remain.

One thing you might try is a softer Pixel Filter. But it wouldn't really solve the underlying issue. Being able to use real populations instead of displacement and thus raytrace the grass/vegetation effect might also help.

If you're able to share the base scene file (even without the objects) with us then I can take a closer look and see if there are other options. support AT planetside.co.uk, attachments up to 20MB in size, or you can use wetransfer, mega.nz, etc.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: First animation attempt
Post by: sboerner on May 14, 2016, 02:30:25 PM
OK. You're right about the GI settings. My overnight render still had some crawling. It was improved slightly but that's probably because of the slight increase in the Quality setting. I can't imagine rendering with a quality setting higher than 1 . . . the render times are already getting prohibitive.

I did try the Cubic B Spline filter but the result was the same, just blurrier.

Give me a day or two to strip all the extra stuff out of the scene and I'll send it by email. I really appreciate the time you're spending on this. Have to say the experience has been a good introduction to the renderer.