Hi there. I finally decided to join this amazing community and here is my first post, which is actually a call for help
So in short, I rendered an animation for a VR Video (7168 x 3584 px). The animation has 4320 frames. Everything was good so far, except the flickering of the shadows, especially on the leaves. Since the resolution is high and the animation is relatively long, I drastically reduced render settings and even so, my renders are about 3 minutes and a half each, which is a lot, considering the amount of frames to render.
So I realized this might have something to do with the denoising, I tried to use temporal denoising in a dozen of frames just to see what would happen, and even though it seems to improve a little bit, it doesn’t solve the problem, maybe because of the low render settings.
I didn’t want to accept this as it is but I guess I don’t have much choice, and I wouldn’t want to render it all again, unless I find a faster way of doing it. I even tried to find some way of fixing it in video production, no luck.
As an example you can look at this video:
When I rendered this animation, I realized the same thing happened, but because the trees are further and there are more light, I could leave it be. But this new animation is worse because it has more shadows and the trees are closer.
I realized the flickering seems to happen way more on the leaves. Could this have something to do with alpha textures?
Can anybody help me with this? Thank you in advance.
Denoise is a problem to little details in animations. I don’t think you have problem with textures alpha.
The tips I can say is :
1- Use a render farm to speed your renders (disable denoise).
Try the free render farm www.sheepit-renderfarm.com
2- Try use Eevee render engine
3 - If possible disable the wind, less movement less problem with denoise.
4 - Render the background in a large resolution and after scale dow in video editor. (I think the noise will be reduced)
And you did a very good work with your dinosaur animation. Congratulations.
On the Texture Nodes with Alpha textures - do you have the Alpha set to Premultiplied? That may or may not help.
Have you split the scene into View Layers (above the outliner) ??
The ground only needs to be rendered in one frame and that one frame composited through the whole video. The same with the sky - composite and slow movement of a single image.
Use pre-done image planes for half the trees. The far away ones at least.
Render the moving trees on their own with less or no denoising.
I am assuming all this works the same for 360 Video… Never done any.
TBH - the flat flat ground screams computer generated. Make it more like a beach - random.
I built my knowledge on blender around cycles. Never thought much about eevee to be honest. I did a research after reading your reply, apparently, for what I read, eevee should be used in some animations, because it is much faster, while cycles should be used for still images that require more realism.
There’s no wind, the ground is populating particles (trees, grass, etc.) and the objects used as particles have a simple animation, almost as simple as moving back and forward. Then again, I could stop the movement, on the other hand the scene would become too still in my opinion. But that’s something to think about.
I will try to render a couple of frames in eevee and see how it goes.
I don’t have the Alpha set to Premultiplied. In fact, I don’t have that option in my nodes as I am using an image texture node linked to the alpha in a Principled BSDF node. I am using a black and white image for the alpha texture. Tried to completely remove the alpha, but the flickering continues.
I do have my scene splitted in different layers, only to keep it easy for me to select or hide things. I don’t use much compositing, I did use it a couple of times before. I have to look into it though, I understand how useful it can be, but I have yet to learn much about it.
I understand what you say about the flat ground, but it is what it is because of the same reason the scene has few details. Less polygons to better the render performance.
