Animation Artifacts...using Mental Ray

[Claudio Branch]

I am rendering a scene with some materials that are procedural and have a noise map in the diffuse slot. I am rendering with Mental Ray and my animation is showing alot of flashing inside these noise-based materials.

 

I am also seeing alot of flashing in the shadow areas of some very slender stair rails.

 

Any body out there have any suggestions?

[John Dollus]

Flashing along thin verticals would tend to be an AA issue but for the procedural texture, you can examine a couple things:

 

High contrast textures can produce abnormal flicker so if your noise map has black/white values, reduce the contrast of the base texture and increase the value of the shader using the procedural to compensate.

Also, you can render the procedural out to a bitmap, tile it with a bit of Pshop work and reapply it as a bitmap in the material.

 

Are you using a mental ray base material type or one of Max's?

[Claudio Branch]

The mat is a standard blinn shader.

 

The whole point of using the procedural was to avoid using a tiled map!

[John Dollus]

Any way you could post an image of the procedural and a screen cap of the material/map navigator?

If the procedural has areas of high contrast, adding a blur function can help.

[William Alexander]

Blur or changing the MR AA theshold might help to

[Claudio Branch]

Thanks for the tips everyone!

 

I was using a noise map in the diffuse slot without the blur turned up and it really looked like the texuture was partially animated...

 

...using the blur function and tweaking the spatial contrast values within Mental Ray got me home free.