Noise with animated textures, foliage etc.
Greetings, fellow Bryceists.
The headline describes the essence of my woes. I have used Bryce since Bryce 3D on an on & off basis and recently got back to it (Bryce 7.0 Pro on an adequate Windows 8.1 PC), and the one thing that always annoyed and baffled me before made its appearance again:
Whenever I make an animation with some trees and foliage or even some pretty basic natural-looking ground textures, I get an awful lot of unwanted noise - pixels disappearing and re-appearing from frame to frame as the textures start to "live" too much. The effect is especially disturbing with foliage in close range and a slow moving camera but visibly so with for instance some grassy-looking textures also. I have tried all kinds of combinations of resolutions * anti-aliasing options as well as file compressions and what not, but could someone give me some pointers towards some filters or something that would calm the elements down in my animations, please? So far the only thing that seems to have helped is to apply an blur effect in Paint Shop or something similar to each frame and then putting the animation back together, but that sort of misses out on quite a bit of the potential of Bryce 7.. . So far trying to make everything crystal clear and with as large a resolution as possible hasn't seemed to be of much help, for example - i still get a disturbing amount of unwanted extra activity on the screen.
Is this more or less just a feature of the Bryce rendering engine (it seems there is no continuity from frame to frame with lots of pixels dis- and reappearing, as I described above) or is there something fundamentally wrong with my approach in general?
Perhaps you know what I'm talking about, or should I attach an example? Not really sure how to attach an an .avi file here, though.
Take care & thanks already!
Tuomas K.
Comments
Sounds like the kind of problem being talked about in video. Sorry that I can't offer any advice, animation is not something I know much about. But maybe there will be some useful clues in the video. Oro is the Bryce animation master.
Indeed, it is because Bryce doesn't see it as a continuous flow, it makes individual frames.
There are things you can do to reduce it, but sadly, unless you use Oro's approach and start masking and compositing in your video editor, it will be difficult to get rid of entirely.
The main thing is to choose materials wisely with annimation in mind. Bump will always cause this effect because it's the render engine adding fake shadows to flat surfaces.
Another thing to bear in mind is render settings. You've mentioned altering the AA pass so I guess you're aware of that one. It's also worth noting that Anthing where you use the premium setting and switch TA on is going to give unwanted noise, unless you go right up the RPP scale and then each frame simply becomes a lengthy thing and a few seconds of animation will take a few days to render.
Hope this helps.
Other animation tips. Try turning off self shadows in material lab. Sometimes I turn off receive & cast shadows to. Reflective properties can also create noise in animations. Never use world space mapping on moving objects, the material changes with altitude & distance.
Thanks a lot for your efforts, people.
Haven't yet had the time to try the tips above but will do as soon as possible, although you might wish to consider explaining those acronyms (TA, RPP?) to me a little, Dave S.
How about this ( http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/2839/bryce-tutorials ) list of tutorials, anything there relevant to my question? Wouldn't want to wade through all of those somehow seemingly linked to the issue and I thought someone of you might tell me straight away which ones to focus on, if any.
karjalainentuomas - I'm not in animation but I think David Brinnen's link to Oroboro's videos is the best place for animation tutorials. Now TA is True Ambience (a misnomer for Bryce's Global Illumination - misnomer because it started based on Ambience in Corel Bryce 5 and is now based on Diffuse, as it should). RPP are Rays Per Pixel for the 2nd Bryce render engine. It can be adjusted in the Render Options, like MRD, Maximum Ray Depth.
Thanks Horo.
@ karjalainentuomas: What Horo said.