irradiance for animation

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

....if someone who knows about vray irradiance map settings could help me, i will give you my first born. well maybe not, but it would certainly be appreciated. i am working on an animation for a hospital. the deadline is quickly approaching. this is my first time using vray for animation, and i am having trouble setting the irradiance map parameters.

 

i have objects flickering in the animation. most noticable above the arms hanging from the ceiling in the surgery. there are 2 inch buttons there that hold the removable panels in place. i think they are 1/4" from the ceiling surface, and 1-2" in diameter. sometimes they are there, sometimes they are not.

 

here is a clip of the animation showing what i am talking about.

 

http://www.phase22.com/temp/surgery.wmv (windows media v7, 3.1 megs)

 

..and here are my irradiance map, and antialiasing parameters.

 

 

i am struggling with what each of the settings actually do. so far i have not found a good link describing what each one does.

 

thanks for any help.

[Chad Warner]

It's been awhile so I am not sure about the settings, but I think you want to set your Clr thresh lower...looking at settings I used, I have Clr thresh set to .4, Nrm thresh set to .5 and Dist thresh set to .4. I know those settings were used specifically to stop flickering like that.

 

-Chad

[IC]

Nice modelling and lighting!

I know-no help whatsoever.

[Chad Warner]

Oh yeah....definitely nice modeling and lighting. How long per frame?

 

-Chad

[Tim Nelson]

I've had similar problems before, and its been my experience that the best way to fix that is to raise your min. rate on your antialiasing. Sometimes, to get everything to show up consistently, I had to raise the value to 0 or even 1. Probably not the answer you want to hear though.

 

Then again, I don't know a whole lot about the clr and norm. threshold values, so there may be a more efficient answer.

 

Maybe you can cheat a little bit and make those objects a little larger. That way they would be more likely to show up on each frame.

 

Have you tried searching the Chaotic forum? There are a lot of vray geniuses there, and I know the topic has been discussed before.

 

Beautiful clip so far though. The wall tile is awesome.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

thanks for the advice chad and timmatron. i will try these to see if they work. ..i will browse the vray forums also. i wish they would hurry up and put out a manual. at least this way people can not respond with 'RTFM'...

 

 

thanks for the compliments guys, i did the modeling in formz, and of course, the animation and rendering in max/vray.

[Christopher Nichols]

Ok this is a completely blind suggestions since I am at work and I cannot view your file since I am using Linux. BUT it seesm that your AA settings are sorta bad which MAY contribute to bad flickering.

 

you have a Adaptive AA with -3 3. That seems very strange. I would suggest you use -1 3 or 0 3. having such a low min could make for really big AA sample which could look like a Irradiance sample flickering especially on large flat areas.

 

For high detail AA or anithing with detailed textures, I suggest using simple two level with 1 4

 

----------

--- OK... I did take a close look at your anim from my home computer and it is completely your AA settings. I'll bet you a dollar.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

.....i tried the new settings, but i am still having problems.

 

http://www.phase22.com/temp/induction.wmv (windows media 9, 1.2 megs)

 

the irradiance map with the 0.4 control mesh didn't effect calculation time that much. i used AA settings of... 'adaptive subdivion -1 3'.

 

at the beggining i lose the foot to the chair a couple of times, the doors through the glass are dancing around, and my wood texture is fluttering.

 

i will try 'simple two level 1 4', and see if that helps.

 

the settings i did this clip with...

 

[muzzy]

Hey Crazy,

 

I am digging the chaotic dimension forum to do animation with Vray last two weeks. Usually , people set the AA for fixed 4 or 5 with random checked or for Adaptive 0, 2 in animations.

 

Have you tried any of those options ?

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

well, it is slowly coming around. i set AA to a fixed rate of 5, and it calmed most of the stuff down. i still have some jumping in a few spots, but not nearly as bad as it was.

 

...i seem to be having texture trouble alos. max's default chrome/stainless steel using the lake image map does not seem to work well in animation, at least animation with vray.

 

http://www.phase22.com/temp/surgery_2.wmv (windows media 9, 3.1 megs)

 

thanks for the help.

[Tim Nelson]

Are you using the lake map to simulate reflections/shiny-ness? Haven't used that one in a long time, so I can't remember.

 

But I would suggest using a Vray mat. to do the real thing. Can be done fairly easily but probably at the sacrifice of longer render times. Here is one steel material I have set up. I'm sure you could just tweak the glossiness and anistropy to get what you are looking for. Subdivs. set at 8 seem to get rid of most of the noise but not all.

 

Good luck! Animation is looking sweet.

[Tim Nelson]

Oops i thought I had attached the material settings too.... here they are.

[Christopher Nichols]

just a throught.... off the wall... there seems to me that there was issues with texture maps, which is an internal thing in MAX, but comes up with Vray. The solution was to go into your maps and select "crop" with the default settings (no crop), also change the map from summered average to piramid or the other way around (forgot which one it was... don't have max around me right now).

[IC]

Nice animation CHG. You should share more of your work with us.

 

Isn't that the room where Bruce Banner tried an experiment?

[Tim Nelson]

So Travis,

 

Are you done with the animation yet? If so I think we'd all love to see how it turned out - especially me since I am probably going to do my first Vray interior animation here in the next couple of months.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

So Travis,

 

Are you done with the animation yet? If so I think we'd all love to see how it turned out - especially me since I am probably going to do my first Vray interior animation here in the next couple of months.

you would think i should be done by now, but the scope has been expanded and such..

 

i will post in completed work when it is done, as well as the settings i used. it will probably be another week or two before it is entirely complete.

[carlitos]

what AAfilter should i use fior animation_

[ChrisE]

to stop the flickering you need to do and irradiance pass, so you can normally render every 10 or so frames (this will depend on how much your scene changes) with "Incremental add to current map" save this off to a file, and turn off render final image.

 

then render your scene choseing the irrandiance file you just made.

 

i assume you know where to find this options if not its under glodal switches and advanced irradiance map parameters.

 

i hope this helps.

[stylez]

Hi there CHG,

After looking at your animation that you posted - which looks really great btw - I was wondering if you could tell me what your settings were for the irradiance map and advanced irradiance map parameters. Also I was wondering what computer you are using to render, and roughly how long per frame it took to render, because I am trying to rendr an animation myself, using the same technique where I render an irradiance map first then render the image after... but it's taking about 1 hour per frame... and I have about 6000 frames to render. I am using a P4 2.8GHz, 256MB Radeon 9600 Pro, 2Gigz RAM - I don't think it should be taking this long - anyways if anyone knows a fastwer way, PLEASE HELP ME! - and if CHG could post ur settings I would appreciate it, cause i would really like to know how long it's taking for you.

 

thnx

- Stlyez

[kris]

The flickering problem.

Its not logical to me that the problem is in antialiasing becouse this details on the ceeling are way to big to disapeare from frame to frame becouse of antialiasing.

Usually the flickering accours if you have two 3d elements on the same position and 3dsMax doesnt know which one to show. So sometimes it shows one element, and next frame other element.

Maybe this spots that are flickering are just 2d maps on ceeling and I am wrong, but I had experience with flickering and usually that was the reason.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

The flickering problem.

Its not logical to me that the problem is in antialiasing becouse this details on the ceeling are way to big to disapeare from frame to frame becouse of antialiasing.

Usually the flickering accours if you have two 3d elements on the same position and 3dsMax doesnt know which one to show. So sometimes it shows one element, and next frame other element.

Maybe this spots that are flickering are just 2d maps on ceeling and I am wrong, but I had experience with flickering and usually that was the reason.

i think the surfaces disappearing were to close to the ceiling tiles. they were about a quarter of inch off of the tiles. i slid them to be half an inch off, and that took care of the problem. although i think 1/4" should have been enough, it wasn't in this case.

[stylez]

so CHG, when do we get to see this animation all done? cant wait to see how it turns out.... great work so far

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

so CHG, when do we get to see this animation all done? cant wait to see how it turns out.... great work so far

i posted it in finished work section awhile ago, http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/showthread.php?t=5738

 

I was working on an animation last week and have got problems with the irmap too. How do u save it? Every frame or every 10th?

 

Your anim looks very clean and nice lighted up...congrats.

About the flickering...if i know well it is because of the threshold in the adaptive subdivision. Set it to a value under 0.1. Ex:0.07 works fine and didnt lengthen too much the render times.

i typically do every 20th frame, although i have been playing around with doing every 30th frame. i have never ran into a problem using every 20th.

 

for AA i now use...

 

adaptive subdivision

min 1 max 3

threshold set to 0.05

 

...although in the surgery animation i had my min max set at 2 and 6.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Is it a script for changing that camera view in that way?

i am not sure i understand... i think you might mean several different cameras, switching between scenes. each scene was modeled and animated as a seperate animation, and then combined using aftereffects.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

My max crashes always with an irmap bigger than 50mb.

that's firgin' huge! ...i think my largest map has been 7 megs. i think Vray makes a stand alone app that combines several seperate irradiance maps into 1 file. not sure if it would help you, but just throwing it out there.