flickerfree final gathering examples

[Kzin]

perhaps someone of you had seen this in the mi forum, but want to share this also here.
i did some fg animation tests the last time to find a way to render dynamic gi in mr flickerfree but with good rendertimes.
the fg_shooter shader is a newer addition to do this so i created a testscene. it is a simpler one of an archvizscene we had some troubles to render flickerfree gi with vray. vray failed in this and alot of other scenes because the rendertime skyrocket also with interpolated gi (rendertime was about 7 to 15 hours per frame in 720p). alot of indirect light does not work very well in vray, except you use brute force, but brute force tends to render 30 hours per frame in 720, so its not an option (mr brute force will be faster here, but also not fast enough, as a sidenote).

this is a rendering with moving sun and also some moving objects (sorry for the bad hoster):
http://www.file-upload.net/download-448 ... g.rar.html

the settings are for fg: 150rays, 50 int points, fg distance min0/max100 density of 1,5 and 2 diffuse bounces.
physical sun/sky and portal lights for the windows. rendertime was 50 min on my i7 3930k.
unified was set to min1/max32 and quality of 2 and motion blur enabled.

in addition to the rendercam i have 4 cams in the scene which are slighty moved from the rendercam and pointing in different directions(only slighty different from the rendercam).
these cams have fg_shooter as lens shader applied. with this shader fg covers a bigger area of the scene and if the rendercam moves (the fg_shooter cam are rigged to the rendercam) or rotates it already has fg points in this area so the fg solution will be much cleaner and stable. but its fully dynamic, nothing will be baked, except you want to do this.
you only have to create cameras that covers the whole scene, render the fg for frame one and reuse this for a simple flythru for example.


i also optimized the scene a bit more with these settings different from the first one: 125rays, 35 int points, fg distance of 200, gives more occlusion and the fg does not take reflection into account, because there is no visible difference. rendertime now is 19min on my machine. its alot better, glossimetal needs more local samples, but rendertime would not be much higher.
http://www.file-upload.net/download-448 ... 2.rar.html

the fg shooter method works great, did also another test with a different archvizscene (sorry, cant show it) and also here no splotches or artifact or shimmering. the gi solution is clean and stable. compared to vray this scene its about 3 to 5 times faster then irramap and lightcache, not to mention brute force.

edit by gustavoeb: please use URL tags

[Kerro Perro]

Very interesting stuff, thanks for sharing!

[Maximus]

Thanks for those tests, very interesting.
Always wondered how to setup a correct fg_shooter scene, seems quite hard for normal user. So i'd be interested, it requires scripting?
Cause the manual itself doesnt help much on how it should set up.

thanks

[julius]

Can you host your video anywhere else ?

Can't download anything else than "setup.exe"

Thanks

[Kzin]

Thanks for those tests, very interesting.
Always wondered how to setup a correct fg_shooter scene, seems quite hard for normal user. So i'd be interested, it requires scripting?
Cause the manual itself doesnt help much on how it should set up.

thanks

no scripting, just insert the fg_shooter node as lens shader in the additionell cams, thats it, like adding a mia_exposure shader. ;)


@julius: there is a green arrow near "download", click on download and it starts.

[Maximus]

Did you use append to FG file option?

[Kzin]

Did you use append to FG file option?

no, file per frame. the fg renders from all the cams will be automatically merged to 1 fgmap per frame.

edit: but keep in mind that you have to use a higher presample density value because more cams means more are that fg has to cover. thats because i uses density of 1,5 instead of 1.

[gena_f1]

Kzin Did you connect transormation matrix to shader somehow, or it reads camera transformations automatically?

[Kzin]

Kzin Did you connect transormation matrix to shader somehow, or it reads camera transformations automatically?

i did not connect anything to fg_shooter because this should done automatically as i understood.

[Mathaeus]

Kzin Did you connect transormation matrix to shader somehow, or it reads camera transformations automatically?

i did not connect anything to fg_shooter because this should done automatically as i understood.

well, Maya people use it through script - at bottom of the page. According to docs, looks like the default is world zero position.
All in all, nothing hard to do for developers of any other render engine on the planet, *if* they consider it as usable.

[Maximus]

I actually found this addon which is kinda nice..
Videos showing how to use it. Hope it can be of some help

http://maxfoxlab.com/mx_fgshooter.html

Im getting 1 fg map file for each frame for some reason, nothing is being merged, using map file settings as "overwrite existing file". Ended up with 600 fg map fles
Si2013 sp1.

[SpookyMunky]

Maximus - In the final gathering window in renderer options, under where it says Map File, delete .[Frame] so it will just use the pass name, or you could give it its own name. Thats the way I have been getting single FG maps to append to atleast

[FXDude]

hi
gena_f1 was asking if you needed to pass info to the tranform matrix in the shader,
but I too thought something had to be put in there
(default is 0,0,0,0...)

..cause with the 'MX' addon,
it goes through ICE to get & convert camera SRT's to matrix, to then pass (put) those values back to the fgshooter rendertree shader.


(btw.. I never undertood the idea of tranform matrix format.. same amount of values to store as SRT, except just human-unreadable (to most humans).. maybe just how the machine sees srt's raw, but i would vouch to internally convert anywhere we see those)

So considering your very much flicker-free test, it seams that maybe since then, "0,0,0,0,...." defaults to the camera's matrix it's applied to , instead of just the center of the universe(?)

which does sound like a better/improved integration!

I'm anxious to revive old fg scenes and check it out
thanks for the pointer! cheers..

[julius]

Hello all,

Did some tests yesterday with mip_FGshooter and a simple animated interior scene, but I'm not satisfied with the result.

1 -I create and animate my camera
2- I duplicate 4 times my camera and move and rotate them slightly around the original one, and put a fg shooter in the lens shader of these ones (the 4 duplicated ones only).
3- I set the presemple density to 1.5 in the renderer options. (aother FG settings : multiframe, 250 rays, 30 points, fallof disable)
4- render
Result : flickering is still the same.
Did I forget something ?

Thanks

[Kzin]

Hello all,

Did some tests yesterday with mip_FGshooter and a simple animated interior scene, but I'm not satisfied with the result.

1 -I create and animate my camera
2- I duplicate 4 times my camera and move and rotate them slightly around the original one, and put a fg shooter in the lens shader of these ones (the 4 duplicated ones only).
3- I set the presemple density to 1.5 in the renderer options. (aother FG settings : multiframe, 250 rays, 30 points, fallof disable)
4- render
Result : flickering is still the same.
Did I forget something ?

Thanks

some more informations would be good.
i used automatic fg mode in my example and portal lights for the windows.
in which areas do you get flickering? did the fg shooter cams covered that areas earlier then your rendercam? how much earlier and how much more they covers of the scene?

[julius]

I get an overall big amount of flickering, but more important in the room's angles.
Also, I did'nt used portal lights.
For your other questions, I think the best is to share the test scene

Thanks