Animation of Procedural Noise Textures

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Is it safe to assume that most small noise textures are going to animate poorly?

Example: http://www.sightsea.com/blender/009_Desert_sand.jpg

I’ve been around the block on this one and a few others, trying all of the suggestions I can find and still there is the dreaded flickering.

Rendering to NTSC .tga then compiling it in blender or just doing my quick tests to uncompressed .avi … same result.

This one … the same material and texture with only a size setting change animates with no flickering at all.
http://www.sightsea.com/blender/007_Mountain_sand.jpg
…but obviously the look of fine sand is lost.

The setting differences are all ( and only ) in Map Input Size:
The fine one that I want that animates with flicker is set to:
50,50,50

The other one that animates perfectly that could be a compromise is set to:
1,2,0.1

What I’ve tried that hasn’t worked:
Recalculate all normals outside
Set Solid
Auto smooth
No V.Normal Flip
Turning the clouds texture off, used to generate the noise
in the sand.

There’s only one plane there, no duplicate.

The only thing that works is decreasing the size in
“Map Input”
from 50,50,50, to 1,1,1 ( or anything in the lower range )
however it not longer looks like grainy desert sand, but more like american desert dirt.

So … should I give up on doing these type of textures and expecting them to animate properly or does anyone have an other suggestion?

Thanks!

2

I could be wrong, but I think the trouble comes from making the texture smaller than the actual pixel size on your display. Try increasing the size in small increments to find a spot where it looks good. Also, you can change the noise size in the Texture panel instead of relying completely on the map input. Here is a musgrave texture that on my screen looks good and doesn’t flicker (map input was left at 1,1,1):

Mat.jpg774×242 75.1 KB

3

Hi,

Thanks.

I’ll try a few things and report back if I find an answer.

Steve

4

Noise is random noise generated each frame. To use fixed noise, use the fixnoise texture plug-in,

5

I guess I didn’t make that clear in my post. Yes, do not use the procedural texture called Noise. Use one of the others like Musgrave. Like PapaSmurf said the actual Noise texture is random on each frame. However, the others are not AFAIK.

6

Thanks … I’ll have a go at the musgrave of the plugin Papa suggested right now.

SK

7

Thanks Guys … but no luck.
Still flickering too much with musgrave (…by the way I was using clouds all along, not noise … sorry for the confusion )

Also, the fixnoise plugin, … slightly ( only slightly ) less flicker, but still too much.

Craigomatic seems to have found the best solution here:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=101392&highlight=flickering+animation

… so I went with taking a camera shot (in blender) of the texture, saving as .png, and then tweaking in photoshop.
I’ll hit it again to get some sparkly grains in there an other day, but using an image is the way to go for this type of thing, it seems.

Here’s my quick test render:
http://www.sightsea.com/flv/fly/fly1.html

On to my next snafu!!! :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks again!

Steve

8

Shading> Links and Pipeline> Render Pipeline> Full Osa ENABLED

This fixes a procedural-texture-animation-sparkle-problem that I was getting using Musgrave. I have been chasing this problem across several forum threads for a while and nothing else that I tried (short of baking and using images) has resolved it: Noise size, Map Input size, Solid vs. Smooth.

Arc :smiley: