Plane flickering between frames

Hello everyone. This may be in the wrong place so feel free to move it.

I have a weird situation when rendering an animation of a simple scene. The scene is a bunch of orange capsules falling onto a white plane. Certain frames are darker and (if zoomed in) appear to be full of noise. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern between frames and I have tried about everything to get rid of the dark frames but only one thing has worked. Deleting all the capsules but the first 15 or so seems to fix the problem but it doesn’t seem to be a specific one that is causing the problem. I would like to have all the objects obviously, so this doesn’t really help. I’m using the latest release (2.78c).

I’ve attached the glitch.blend (8.7 MB) file and a photo showing a couple of frames for comparison. I might be able to upload the whole animation as a video later. The flickering is quite obvious in the video so I can’t leave it as it is. If you have any ideas, your help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,


Better quality image


Better quality image

this could be multiple importance sampling. try setting the min and max samples to the same, like 8 or so.

are you using any compositing? maybe try an older version of blender?

im away from my pc and cant look at the blend.

I’ve tried setting both the min and max samples to 12, with no effect. Disabling multiple importance sampling for the world, plane, and capsules doesn’t work either.

I’m not using compositing.

I did some renders on 2.74 and I get the same result. What I did find out (by accident) is that the darker frames are different when rendered on CPU. They are darker and noisier, and there’s a 45 degree line running through the middle. I attached another comparison picture so you can see what I mean. The normal frames look the same on the CPU and GPU.

i just took a look at your blend. your camera start clip IS TOO LOW! this should NEVER be less then 1cm (0.01 units). the far clip should only be set as far as you need. the farther the far clip, the higher your low clip needs to be.

the scene scale doesnt need to be changed, im going to guess this is a contributing issue. at 0.001 blender gets really iffy.

EDIT: i didnt render it to test, since my computer cant be out for that long normally.

I didn’t realize the clip was so important. I tried different clip values, but it still doesn’t fix the problem unfortunately. I’ve set it to 1cm/3.5m now anyway. While I was at it, I changed the scene scale to meters as well. No effect.

Like I said in the original post, it seems to fix itself when I delete some of the capsules. I guess I’ll play around with that a bit and see if I can figure anything out.

Thanks for your suggestions

turn off ambient occlusion.

Both frames are darker (obviously), but the one is still noticably darker and noisier than the other still.