Christopher Nichols' DMC settings and flicker

[liron]

Hi there,

Hopefully mr. Nichols himself will help me understand this, but if anyone here knows about this - please feel free to answer.

 

I've seen Nichols' gnomonology tutorial about vray speed vs. quality, and was amazed by the technique Nichols suggests (turning everything into a noise problem). He also noted he doesn't use Irradiance Maps for animation, and rather use a combination of BF and LC. I understood this as a way to avoid GI flicker problems in animated objects.

In the end of the DVD Nichols gives a few of his own settings, which include DMC sampling of min:1 max:16 and Clr threshold of 0.001.

 

Ok, now for my problem. I used these settings in a project I am involved in these days. i get less flicker but still - in some areas - flickering is obvious.

 

My question is:

 

1). am I doing something wrong?

2). should I even expect no flicker GI solutions? or is this sci-fi and only workes with baked IR (tell me it ain't true)

3). if vray can't handle flickering, and MR can't (and this is from bitter experience with the same project) and no matter how high you set your parameters it is not written anywhere that god promised a flicker free GI - THEN what??

 

thanks,

 

Liron

[Claudio Branch]

I regularly use IR + LC and have no problem getting a flicker-free V-Ray animation.

 

I calculate and save the light cache first. Then I reload it for use with the calculation of the Irradiance Map. Finally, I reload the saved irradiance map and then render out the whole sequence.

 

No big deal really...

[liron]

Hey Claudio,

Do you use these settings for scenes where more than just the camera gets animated?

If you mean baking a GI solution, through saved IR map, for a Camera fly-through - this is something I know of. But if you talk about scenes with animated objects and characters - that's a technique I would be happy to hear about! if this works for animated object scenes - than I'd love to know what image sampler you use in conjunction (Adaptive subdivision? DMC?).

 

Thanks!

 

Liorn

[Claudio Branch]

My scenes usually only involve camera movement. I set the IR to every 10th frame. With lots of moving objects, I would have to go every frame I suppose and see what that gets me...