I’m looking for a white-on-white look. No color, no maps.

Import .obj model of a building.
No Sky Map.
Set up GI as per Ian’s tutorial.
Simple camera move.
Flickering all over the place.
Kicked AA up - chatter.
Rendered out grid points - looks good.
Tried 32X32, 800 primary/400 secondary - chatter
Detail factor up to 1 - chatter
Welded the model and added dicer with triangulate - chatter
Followed advice in Geordie James thread. - chatter
I’ve done about 50 renders and keep getting chatter.

Is this a lost cause?

Hiya

If you’re referring to the GI sampling area at 32x32, this will be working against you, you need to lower this value to improve things.

ta

nige

If your building is all white (no glass), secondary rays do absolutely nothing for you but slow your rendering down, as they only are visible in reflections and refractions… but still calculated if you have rays set for them.  10 for secondary is often fine if you have glass.

If you want the occlusion look (cloudy day lighting) you will have to have some form of Sky Light, otherwise all you are getting is a bounced light from a standard light which is using Reverse Illumination.  Sometimes having a standard light using GI helps with noise from GI Sky Lights. If you are only using Gi Sky Light, then you can turn off Reverse illumination bounces, as they are not used.

When you added dicer the problem probably got worse, as GI calculates between sample pixels which relate directly to your geometry.

With stills, people report getting better results with 32X32 and increasing ray count, as it gives a smoother result (by not being as detailed, it’s often brighter as well.  Not as accurate though.) With animations people report get better results with a denser 1X1 sampling level and increasing ray count, as it is more accurate, so the results line up better between frames.

If you double the pixel size (ie 800X400 to 1600X800) of your rendering, does it go away? 

You should try adjusting the color tolerance (5-10), and the details factor (1).  These also can help.  As well decreasing in the cone angle can help, though it looks like it has more contrast.

The best way to see where the noise is coming from is see what is being sampled with ‘show samples’ turned on.

You might get the GI tutorial at Paralumino, from Dave.  He has a lot of good tips.

Let us know what worked for you when you get it.

Yon

Well Yon, those are good tips. I’ve tried’em all and by the time I get a move to work cleanly, it takes more than 20 times longer than the occlusion shader in 6.5.  Here’s a link to a QT that illustrates my concern.

http://www.pixelmonger.com/1_public/otest1.mov

At this render time (about a minute pr frame) the 6.5 occlusion is perfect while the 7 occlusion is just not usable.

It feels like I just plunked down the stiffest upgrade pricing in the industry for something that just doesn’t work.

You may try turning off distance limit, as that has a known bug, that may be causing the noise (and certainly doesn’t help the rendering times.) You still have some more leeway with the sampling range 1X1 for example.  Did rendering it 2x larger help?  And just curious, doesn’t the occlusion shader still work with 7?

I’m not sure that you have wasted money on the upgrade.  The real advantage of this update, as far as the occlusion look is concerned is in Reverse Illumination and in Adaptive Sky Maps.  Granted the noise issue remains, and if bumping up the sampling levels makes the rendering times too great to use these advantages are cancelled as options.  You still get the photoshop layers with 7.  For me the upgrade has been a huge gain.  Of course I deal with stills.

Yon

Thanks for the help Yon. I followed your advice and it is significantly better. Still not something I’d ever use on the big screen and not nearly as good a the Occlusion shader in 6.5, but better. It also took 21 hours to render on an 8 processor MacPro, while a very usable render took 107 minutes to render using 6.5 on a dual 2.7GHz G5.

As for using the old Occlusion Shader, few of my numerous EI plugins work with 7. Those that do seem to crash often. Occlusion doesn’t work at all.

I understand why you’re a fan of this cut though. Since you do still image work, PhotoShop layers and other improvements for still frame work, make EIAS the up-and-comming still image tool. I guess we should stop calling it EIAS and just start calling it EIS.

Interestingly enough, 7 didn’t address a single thing that us animation guys have been asking for such as real multiprocessor support or simple inter-application UV support.

It may not help you at all but since the Occlusion shader is no more available, I use Apass.
Could it change something or is it just a “helper” is setting occlusion?

pmonger - 16 May 2008 09:54 AM

Thanks for the help Yon. I followed your advice and it is significantly better. Still not something I’d ever use on the big screen and not nearly as good a the Occlusion shader in 6.5, but better. It also took 21 hours to render on an 8 processor MacPro, while a very usable render took 107 minutes to render using 6.5 on a dual 2.7GHz G5.

As for using the old Occlusion Shader, few of my numerous EI plugins work with 7. Those that do seem to crash often. Occlusion doesn’t work at all.

I understand why you’re a fan of this cut though. Since you do still image work, PhotoShop layers and other improvements for still frame work, make EIAS the up-and-comming still image tool. I guess we should stop calling it EIAS and just start calling it EIS.

Interestingly enough, 7 didn’t address a single thing that us animation guys have been asking for such as real multiprocessor support or simple inter-application UV support.

That seems a very long render time for such a simple project.
If you can share your prj and building model I would be happy to take a look and see what I can do to tweak the GI settings for you.

I am always interested in exploring these kinds of things for better understanding.
Dave

Hey there Dave,

It’s not just one building but rather a complex model where we’ll ‘woosh’ from one person to another. Here’s a rough comp of a few moves that should give you an idea.

http://www.pixelmonger.com/agame_art/agameopentest.mov

This test was all done at low rez with just a few lights. The final needs more of a high-end, white-on-white, classic occlusion look. I’ll be glad to ship out the model to you if you’d like to give it a try. Of course, if you do come up with the magic setting, I gladly pay you, if only to keep on the good side of the pixel gods :-}

~ Scott

Looks like a great project!

You do have a lot of geometry in there after all.

I would say, in general, you need a higher primary ray count. Try doubling it untill everything smooths out.
You shouldn’t need anything over about 1000 rays, but use a few as possible.

You might get away with 4x4 sampling area, and color tolerance of 1 or 2.

You might also want to try the APass shader which will output just the GI shading without writing a PSD.

If you email me a link I’ll be happy to take a look, although I make no promises

Dave

Yeowza!

Dave, Yon, Richard, Nige, thanks for the hep. I gave APass a try. It took a little rummaging around to find a great little settings reference by yhloon at:

http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/forums/viewthread/516/

... I’ll have to remember to buy him a beer at the Beach Club next time I’m in KL.

...  but it seems to be playing nice and rendering much faster. I also seems to be giving me a good look. Setting up a render now.

Cheers

Render’s done. Still chattering up a storm but the good news is that it didn’t take nearly as long.

So Dave, I just shipped off a model of the bldg to you. 3MB It’s coming in from Scott AT PixelMonger.com

Hi Scott,

I have a solution- you may like it, or you may not,
but I was able to render this 16 second shot of your building at HD720P- 30fps in about 10 minutes on a Mac Pro
(using 6 slaves).

Building Animation Test

That’s quite a bit better than either of your previous rendering times, and with no visible GI Noise or Anti-Aliasing problems

The trick is to use camera mapping.

I noticed that your AA problems were not responding to higher AA settings, but they disappeared if the image resolution was increased. It is definately an AA prob- and not with GI sampling.

So I made a second camera and rendered a very high res still of the entire building front (3600x2700) and then opened that image and applied it to the same camera as a camera map.

I then switched to the original camera and changed the rendertype to “phong” instead of raytrace, and voila- super fast render times.

Any other part of your project could be done this way. Although you may need a great many camera maps to map your entire scene this way. You will simply have to split your models up in pieces so that you can apply the maps to specific parts of each model (using selection sets to group pieces together that share the same map).

So there is some significant additional set up time up-front (this simple one took me about 15 minutes), but the AA and render-time should no longer be a problem

Dave

That is a truly inventive methodology Dave.  The single problem is that it doesn’t work for animation where the camera moves take it off angle. Your technique did give me an idea though. I’m going to try a variation of your technique and create single frame occlusion texture maps and then apply them to the buildings set to high luminance. It would be similar to baking the model in a modern app.

If it works, I think we just might qualify for the most-convoluted-work-around-of the-year award.

Scott

I have not done much of this myself, but using multiple maps it would be theoretically possible to orbit 360 degrees around the buildings. I know some other EIAS users do this on very complex animation projects to manually “bake” the GI shading into a model and they have told me it is very effective for this sort of “flythrough” animation.

I think the problem with the original file is between the GI samples and the Anti-aliasing settings. I do not know exactly how these interact, but it does not behave as expected

Good luck-
Dave

Thanks to everyone both on and off-list who tried to get this to work.

EIAS makes fine still images, but we haven’t been able to get a clean animation. Moving on to other solutions.