Perhaps he left out of shame for not quite getting it to work? kiddin’
Fact is Lux is an unbiased renderer and unbiased renderers are based on stochastic methods. That means noise. Great for ultra-realistic stills, never intended for animation at all.
For that you need static maps, be it texture, shadow or photon.
I have done some more experimenting with the various AAO parameters and test renders. I have discovered that the best way to reduce flicker is to simply lower the Error value to at least 0.1. Correction should probably be left at zero. And while Bounces does smooth out the effect very nicely, it greatly increases render time and does nothing to offset flicker if Error is not a low value. Passes also increases render time and does not seem to tame flicker.
I think this video of the shuttle craft in motion is an extreme example too. It brings out the flicker a lot more because the camera is in motion, and the surface emitting the AAO is also in motion against a fixed shadow casting light source. I think a more locked down shot where the camera and emit surfaces are less extreme is less likely to flicker.
I thought I’d pass along my findings as it took hours and hours of repeated test render sequences to discover these basic facts. I hope it helps someone save time.
I think for stills, certainly try upping bounces to at least 3.0 for your final render.
cough cough BS let us not confuse not been able to render things in a timely fashion using a desktop with film studios doing it on a renderfarm …HERE an unbiased engine doing what it isn’t supposed to do; I believe the noise you speak of is of such a nature that if you leave the renderer running long enough it becomes akain to film grain i.e the average human is unable to percieve it or care about it much like raytraced AO which is also grainy but has been used since Pearl Habour came out.
Yeah, except the guys rendering animations with Mental Ray or VRay or Renderman will need much smaller renderfarms and also do it in a much shorter time. Guess there are levels of grainyness x time most producers are willing to accept. Maxwell’s best bet so far were renderings for “The curious case of Benjamin Button”.
Raytraced AO is only grainy given insufficient samples. You pump it up a bit and it’s still way faster than any unbiased methods, plus pretty noise-free. And you don’t even need a renderfarm.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Lux. It’s just not targetting animation at all when there are cheaper alternatives for a fraction of the cost. Would clay-like animations really benefit from ultra-realistic light simulation?
I also don’t understand the eerie fascination with animations. I’m a stills/photography guy. A beautiful moment frozen in a time is worth far more than a multitude of rapid camera cuts, explosions and lip syncs to bad dialogue…
I am adding explosions into my space scene. It is rendering as I type:cool:
Interesting to see that.
One thing I hope dose happen when they redo the rendering and mats system is that we get some kind of boost to the non-realistic rendering methods (like aao).
One thing I hope dosen’t happen is that all the non-realistic methods get slowed down when they upgrade the realistic stuff.
Here is a still from the animation with explosion and shields. In the scene, the shields of the Klingon ship have just received a constant phaser blast from the foreground shuttle which allowed the secondary shuttle to penetrate the shields and damage the hull resulting in an explosion.
And, I finally updated the animation with shields and explosions. I managed to reduce the AAO flickering by lowering the error to a value of 0.3
View it here:
http://www.vimeo.com/8043003
Mighty cool animation, man. Reminded me a bit of the game Star Fox. Good to know the flickering is mostly solved.
Can you elaborate on how you got it working? I’m not having any luck.
Cool test render, can you delay the tracking of the camera so that it seems to be on a seperate platform to the craft infront?
Now that I have a lot of the animation done, I plan on rendering it from several different camera locations. There are some “dead” spots in the currently posted animation that I want to replace with some more feature shots on the main ship and the asteroid field.
@3pointEdit: Presently I have a noise modifier on the camera that is parented to the shuttle the camera is tracking. This gives me some of that offset, but I’m not sure how to delay it. Do you have an idea?
This is what i said a few posts earlier. The error value is the most important thing for setting quality.
I also guessed that correction setting would be made almost redundant with GI.
