Softimage and good skin renders

[Kzin]

The only thing I really hate about MR in Softimage is FG in an animation sequence. If some one can tell me how to get the goddamned flickering in some scenes when the camera is moving with descent settings. I am tired of appending points to the map, freezing it, increasing the rays, turning my chair 2 times to the left then 3 times to the right. Pulling out my hair... It is still there...

density of 2-3
rays 300
points 50

if you need more details use 1000rays instead of 300. if you use a hdrmap for lighting, be sure its not to big, 1k pixel max in width. and the map should be blurred, because fg cant resolve high contrast maps for lighting. and dont use view dependent. this should be a good start.

[Cacoman]

I'm going to try those settings. Just yesterday as I wrote this, I was baking the FG map for an outdoor city scene. At the end I achieved the "no FG flickering result" with these steps:

Overwrite the FG map with:
rays 1024
Points 1
Max Radius 0


At the Adv Opt Tab
Diffuse 1
Sampling contrast all to 0.050
Hit Preview to generate the FG map.

Then changed the setting to

Append FG points to the existing map
rays 8192

The rest the same and rendered with FG only.

The map was generated quite fast, because it was only appending new points to the file.

Then rendered with the map frozen and high antialiasing Mitchell 4 and Min 2 Max 4

Gotcha Pal.

The HDRI map is not blurred, the size is 940 pixels wide by 478.

I am going to try your settings and recommendations tonight. Thanks a lot. Still need to render a few more frames. I will post the results to share with the community.

[Rork]

Is that an static outdoor scene? Then you can get quick and good results with much lower settings than that. Your settings will just add to the rendertime and not see a lot of improvement after a certain threshold.

Best 'trick' to start with is indeed to use a small sized, blurred version of the HDRI. The bigger version of the HDRI you can use for reflections. Have a look into sIBL or alike to see what's going on there.

Rendering flickerfree FG has come up a gazillion time already on a multitude of forums, and a ton of tips can be found very easily.

rob

[Cacoman]

Nope it is not a static scene. It is a matchmove. And yes there is a lot out of there explaining how to get rid of this flickering, but unfortanetly in my experience there is no rule of thumb for every scene. Just when you thought you have it under control, render and discovered that the flickering is there. There are some tiny lines that also needed a very high antialising setting. This aided the FG result and using a small point value, sharpened it enough for the antialias to help. One thing I have not tried is bluring the HDRI. Sounds to me as a very good choice.

What I have found to share is that whenever you use a moving camera with still geometry this problem is very noticeable in every scene and a lot of tweaking needs to be done. When you have moving geometry and a moving camera the simple Multiframe with the default settings, takes care of the job.

I also prefer using IP but in this particular case the scene is too large in scale and has moving objetcs. So making just one importon map is not a good choice

I am trying now 3delight 3.0 which has now included FG and even though for this particular scene is slower than MR and the light setup is different to achieve the same effect, it does not flicker at all. And you can also freeze the point map which speeds up the render.

I hope that someday I can put my hands over Arnold It seems that it is only for the gods...

Here is the work in progress. A lot more needs to be done. This is only the initial approach.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JalAsIHm0Z8

[Rork]

I've done a lot of moving scenes rendered with FG, and always had clean results with some tests and usable settings.

Your big issue here is the HDRI map you're using for lighting. Due to the Monte Carlo principle you will have a lot of artifacts in the FG.
Creating a small, i.e. 200x100px, blurred version of the HDRI will get you a much more uniform firing of rays.
There are special filters for blurring a HDRI, as this has to keep the 360/180 intact.

I hope that someday I can put my hands over Arnold It seems that it is only for the gods...

Dunno, I don't feel special and can play with the Arnold renderer ;)
But as a studio, and if you're really interested, you just have to contact the guys at Solidangle to see what's possible.

Good luck on the renders.

rob

[Cacoman]

Thanks a lot I will try what you say. Thinking of it, it is very reasonable. Never thought of that before. At the end all that you need is the light itself, not the detail. At least I think for an open scene like this one.

Thanks again for sharing knowledge. I let you know what happened. But I am sure you already know ;)