Philippe:

As you know, I've seen (and love) all of your animations past and present. And one thing that confounds me is why I never see the infamous render flicker/noise that occurs when creating animations with any kind of decent texture-mapping in any of your animations.

I have seen a few posts on this issue, but have never seen an answer or resolution. I've asked tech support, but they just recommend cranking up the anti-alias bounces to 25+ (GADZUKES!!)

What do you do? How do you overcome this ANNOYING Vue-Only phenomenon?

Any insight from you, or anyone that knows what causes this and how to avoid it, would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks!

-Tim

Attached Link: http://www.web-runners.com/animation/media/vue-flicker.mpg

Just a few notes:

• YES, this IS an MPG, but it is not the compression causing this, as this was rendered out as an uncompressed TIF sequence initially to eliminate this possibility. The MPG did not introduce any additional flicker/noise.

• This noise (looks like swarming insects or something) happens with just about any default ground texture. Happens with every sample scene from the Vue disc. Some textures are not, IMHO, even that complex.

• I have never seen this occur in ANY other 3D app's rendered animations ... NONE. Vue has a LOT of quirks, but this one takes the cake.

Thanks,
Tim

The V4 manual book talk about that, (ie) page 338.
With some materials (with lot of details) I could have 'flick' too. And with other 3d app too! And in reality (with a real camera, blablabla) too!
Somtetimes it is a good way to use "Large Scale Color" options.

Thanks again for the nice words about my work.
Regards.
Philippe

Well, flickering is definetly not a Vue only problem. I was in animation business since early 80s last century. Believe me up to now i have seen thousands of flickering animations. I am not doing animations these days, after 5000 flying logos i became a little bored. But some thoughts in general. Flickering has to do with size of facets. When the projection of a facet to the drawinf plane (monitor) becomes thinner than 1 pixel the software obviously don't know really what to do. Draw or not to draw. That is the question. In some frames it draws it, in some it don't. Here we are, flickering. Higher anti aliasing settings can make this effect weaker. Another reason for flickering is, when the object space is too small. Means, that you are dealing with objects that are sized down very much. Let's say a software calculates values with 5 digits behind the decimal point. If an object is very small (and therefore the whole object space) and you move it, you beginn to see the "raster". The objects "jumps" from one possible value to the next, but it is not a smooth movement anymore. Lets say it differently. When you look onto objects with a microscope, the movements look much different to those you see without. Conclusion. Try to make your objects bigger and try to increase the anti aliasing settings. Some software packages deal with those effects automatically these days, others don't. AND, beware that this are more theoretical thoughts, not proved with Vue in "reality". Well, i made the experience already even with stills. I loaded a real huge object in first (cathedral) so that every other object had to be downsized heavily. I then had a lot of problems positioning the camera and light and the renderings looked a little strange sometimes (clipping problems as well). One last word before you get upset. Always remember that Vue, even with the Pro line is still in the low price segment. If you want to have a software that has the amount of professionalism you demand, buy Maya, Lightwave, Softimage or 3D Studio. And pay the price. I looked now at your example. Definetly the structure of the texture is too small, under one scanline. I think i forgot this aspect as well. Some textures are good for non flickering animations because of there structure, others are not - same reason as with flickering facets.

Thanks wabe. Write in english is very difficult for me; but I can read. It is a great and clear answer. :-)

Yes, thank you both very much ... VERY educational. However -- and I mean this with all gratitude and due respect -- it still does not answer my question regarding Vue. (Or I'm too dumb to decipher it anyway! ;) )

What specifically can I do (or do YOU do) in Vue to eliminate this? As I said, I am simply using some of the default ground textures on a ground plane in Vue. There is no resizing whatsoever occuring. The example I provided above is simply a ground plane with one of Vue's supplied ground textures, some grass, and an animated Poser wolf. Is it simply a matter of cranking up the anti-aliasing?

Again, I just want to know what you do? For example, in "Fool's Games" and "Sculptor" you have some fairly detailed ground textures, but they do not exhibit the flicker/noise problem at all. How did you accomplish this? What were your anti-alias settings?

Thanks!!

-Tim

I think the problem is, that there is not one solution. Trial and error is the only way. Testing, testing, testing. Setting are always different - in each scene/animation. So i think the only solution is - and Phoul will give you the same answer - try it out. Years of experience are behind everybody who is doing good animations - and stills. Nobody can do that for you. It all must fit into your demands, your style and your settings. That's why my expanations were so "abstract" and not direct to the point. Not possible simply. Important is to understand the basics, the rest is, again, testing, testing, testing! I am really looking forward to see some of your work. Walther By the way, of course you can scale textures up and down!

'Fool's Games' and 'Sculptor' (like all the others) were rendered in broacast default quality, 25 fps. That's all. No specific anti-alias settings. Materials were scaled to have a not too bad result. There are no more secret. May be one: I make lot of "experiences"! I learn always, almost every day. By myself.
Good luck.

LOL, Walther. Answers crossposted :-)

Attached Link: http://www.belino.net/v141003/belino.php3

Great one Phoul. Only the camera :-)))??? The camera... The camera man needs a little tranquillizer. :-))) JOKE!!!!

:-)))))))) In fact, he is not too bad, in front of that kind of guy.

Again, thanks, guys!

Phoul: I already watched it! LOL!! It's a ritual to check your site now. I wish you still had all of your old individual animations available, but I understand the bandwidth issues. Can see "snipets" of them in your awesome demo reels. Wish I could've downloaded them though. They were a constant source of inspiration. Maybe a DVD release is in order?? LOL!

Both: Can you give me a starting point (a rough idea) of how much to scale most of the default ground textures in Vue? Does Pro help eliminate this issue in any way?

Also, I just want to say I am not a newbie animator. I've been involved with computer animation in one form or another since the ATARI ST's were out. And for the record, I don't need to do any scaling of textures or super-duper anti-aliasing to get clean animations in Bryce -- another low cost software. Poser does not exhibit these artifacts either, and my limited animating 3DS-Max never produced these results. That is why I say it is a Vue "quirk", and why I find it somewhat frustrating.

Thanks again.

-Tim

"Great one Phoul. Only the camera :-)))??? The camera... The camera man needs a little tranquillizer." Oh, come, come now ... that is signature Phoul animated camera moves. I like to call it "Phoulesque". LOL! -Tim

PS> Walther: I submitted a couple of animations for the recent DAZ contest. They're supposed to announce winners today, so I'll wait until that is over with then post a link to my second entry "Deep Sea Daftness". The first entry was mostly a talking head shot, but you might find the composition interesting and/or humorous.

There is one sequence rendered in Vue where the noise/flicker is present ... I had to make some judicous use of the blur filter in my editing software! :)

I know this may be a dumb question, but are you rendering at a high enough quality? I would suggest using "Broadcast" or "Ultra" for all final work. Your animation looks very much like the quick lower quality "Preview" render settings that Vue defaults to. That being said, I always use textures rather than procedurals, for so many reasons. You might think about trying a real image map on that ground plane rather than a procedural.

Thanks, Quoll! I give that a shot as well. I probably have dowbnloaded a ton of texture maps in the past, but just in case, any recommendations on a good place to get ground maps? Thanks, Tim

Well, if you have a digital camera, taking pictures of the ground is always a great bet. LOL But barring that, try these to get you started: http://perso.club-internet.fr/lemog/ http://textures.boom.ru/texture/building.htm http://www.animax.it/ There are some great free texture collections available both from Newtek and Alias: http://www.newtek.com/ http://www.alias.com/ And there are seemingly endless sources elsewhere on the web as well.

Thanks! How does Vue handle "stitching" of the map together? I know in Bryce there are about a zillion ways to dothe mapping, including one that helps mask repeting patterns. That is my main concern. I only remember seeing a handful of options in Vue. -Tim

Tim, I've created animatons in Bryce, Infini-D, ElectricImage, and Vue and I am here to tell you that animating procedural textures causes creeps, sparkles, and jitters. Even in Electric Image Universe (which has the high-end AA features Walther mentioned that are in Max, Softimage, Maya and Lightwave) it still takes a lot of tweaking to get rid of high-frequency noise in the shaders. For the reasons Walther mentioned - math is behind the shaders/textures and the math starts to cause mistakes when the noise is less than one pixel or there is too much bump. Getting rid of sparklies is a dark art and not an exact science. Most of the nice Vue ground textures were originally made for stills and they are chock full of high-frequency noise. You have to look in the texture editor and open the functions to look at the noises and how small they are being mapped. The first thing you need to do is take the bump WAY down. The next thing you need to do is look at each internal function and see if you either get rid of some of the underlying noises (if they don't contribute much to the final look of the texture) or set their values higher so the noise they create will end up being large enough to render. Ideally do as both Walther and Phoul said and just globally increase the scale of the whole texture. The final thing you need to do is use the user settings in the advanced render options and turn both object and texture AA on - you'll have to do a lot of test renders but you need to play with the sampling levels until you can see the high-frequency noise going away in still renders. Once this happens start running small test animations and see if the noise is going away. Your final defense against HF noise is to bake the texture map and re-apply it in Vue. Vue pro already has the export feature and you should be able to export the textures as a map and then bring the map back in to serve as your texture. Just make sure the map is large enough so it won't pixellate or only use it on the distant textures (as these are most likely to jitter the most). Creating a clean nature animation is not easy. Using AA like a plow sometimes works if you can afford the enormous render times that entails, it all depends on how much time you have. Staging and testing the animation are the most time consuming parts of creating a clip - camera movements and motion timing and tuning come a close second, but getting the thing to look smooth takes a lot of patience and care no matter what app you are using. Tim - you say you are not a newbie animator - but have you ever tried animating nature scenes? That bump that makes that foreground rock or grass texture seem so realistic will kill you with a jittering mess when you try to animate it. Compromises have to be made in level of detail/bump and even the complexity of the scene itself. Since this scene is going by the viewer at 30 frames per second, they don't have time to notice detail things that would be easily spotted in a carefully studied still. I myself am in the midst of animating a forest with falling leaves in EIU and a jungle scene in VuePro and I am dealing with these issues myself. The biggest trap of all (which I love to do myself) is animating nature scenes. They are complex, full of noisy textures, hard to re-create, and have about a zillion polygons - all things that 3d programs like to choke on. When animating nature you really have to think in baby steps and smaller scenes. Like you - I want Vuepro to work because it is so easy to just load up the vegetation and get a nice looking scene. Half the battle of creating a nice nature scene is really helped along by Vue, but the rest comes from tweaking, testing, and when all else fails baking the textures. I hope this helps. Scott

Vue Pro does offer a powerful new way to limit flicker in animations. It's TEXTURE ANTIALIASING. What it does, is a supersampling of the texture. Normal Vue d'Esprit does only antialias object, so to get an effective result with high frequency textures, or transmapped textures with a very fine definition (such as some Poser hair), you have to set the rendering options to the maximum (and the slowest rendering times). In Vue Pro you can have texture antialiasing even in the so called "superior mode" (which is somewhere between "final" and "ultra"). It allows to get results with textures that with Esprit you can not even obtain with "ultra" mode. Finally you get better results in less time.

Scott:

Thanks SO much for that in-depth explanation ... it was truly helpful. I can't tell you how much I appreciate (and what a relief) it is to hear from ANIMATORS on subjects like these. Typically, I get posts from people who use Vue that haven't added a keyframe in their life! LOL! Still-only artists just have no clue the differences (and to some extent, DEFICIENCIES) in Vue when animating.

I will take your suggestions (as well as Phoul and Wabe, of course) to heart and give it a go. Although I must say, in Bryce either this is simply not true OR the noise/flicker is not NEARLY as apparent. I've done quite a few nature animations in Bryce, and don't remember being "shocked" by the noise I see in Vue renders. I'm going to go check the Bryce forum now and search for "noise" or "flicker" and see what comes up. Not to say I don't believe you ... but, I don't believe you. ;-)

The export function in Pro sounds wonderful. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like this would be nearly a complete solution this problem for me, would it not?

Thanks VERY much, once again!

-Tim

Orio: Thanks! That IS fantastic news ... makes sense too. -Tim

You're welcome Tim and yes even Bryce has these problems but not to the same extent. Bryce uses almost pure fractal procedurals and in Vue you have to change them to fractal yourself. This is one of the reasons why seasoned Bryce users think Vue renders so fast - the non-fractal textures are fast - and VERY noisy ; ) Yes the export should take care of everything. Just set the exported models to a really lo-res (since all you want is the textures) and crank up the texture resolution - then just map the textures and you're in business. Texture maps don't sizzle and that is also the reason Poser never sizzles. Poser4 only uses texture maps. The other reason you don't see Bryce flicker listed much is that VERY FEW people actually animate in Bryce. I have used it since 1.0 and although I love it for stills, the camera movements are jerky as hell and until b5 it always crashed when you animated in it. Good luck with the de-sizzling! Scott

Here is something no one has mentioned, and which I would test against, first: Set your frame rate to 30 FPS. Better yet, is 29.97, but try 30 first. Use a small frame size, best would be 320x240, even if it isn't the ultimate size. But keep the aspect ratio correct. I know that film rate is 24 fps, and we don't perceive flickering on the big screen, but for desktop video, 29.97, or 30, is better. No flickering then. In addition try this: Render to Microsoft Video for Windows UNcompressed frames. Don't choose any codec. If the frame size is 320x240 or around that, your computer will play them back fine, w/o jittering and dropped frames. I'm assuming you have a PC with a 1 GHz processor, or better, and I'm sure you do. My own practice is to render everything out of Vue as uncompressed frames. Then I can do virtually anything with the original file I want to, without further decompression and the resulting quality loss (jaggies, artifacts, and all that stuff). I can then create streaming Windows files (.asf, .wmv, etc.) or Real Video, or mpeg, or whatever. Even use mpeg2 and make a DVD. Hope that helps, Norm

Norm: Thanks for trying, but sorry, you obviously did not read the thread, or even my original posts. -Tim

Greetings Tim: Well, I did read it, but it didn't click where you said rendering to TIF format images -- until I read it again. I've always gone to jpeg, but of course TIF is lossless. (This takes me back to my rotoscoping days.) So I missed that part. I've also delt with the square pixel vs. rectangular pixel situation, too, before software started giving options for that, when rendering out a file. I hope you can find a fix for the problem. Norm

Sorry, Norm if I came across as abrasive. It's just one of those "IF I hear, "It's probably the codec compression" one more time!" kind of things. Also, I never render at anything less than 30fps ... even test renders. Although I may start doing 15fps test renders for Vue, since it is glacially slow once Poser figures are imported. I wish Vue had the ability to do screen renders ... ala Poser, which would write about 3 frames per second. Then again, Vue doesn't even display OpenGL right. Talk about wishful thinking ... LOL! -Tim

The frame rate wouldn't have anything to do with texture flickering.

I know. I think he was thinking that there was some time transcoding going on at final playback on a video monitor or something. You can get a flicker (but it's a different kind of flicker) if you have long segments of 30fps t-coded to 29.97 (sometimes), but more often it is a result of inproper field interlacing.

Ah. Right.

"The other reason you don't see Bryce flicker listed much is that VERY FEW people actually animate in Bryce. I have used it since 1.0 and although I love it for stills, the camera movements are jerky as hell and until b5 it always crashed when you animated in it." Scott: Really? I've used it since version 3 (IT MOVES!), and it literally never crashed on me that I recall. It is one of the more stable apps I have ever used. As far as the camera movements. It doesn't have a smooth motion drop-down like Vue, but it does have a decent animation graph editor (I think it's call "Advanced Motion Lab") where I could easily tweak the camera moves to smooth them out in a few seconds. -Tim

I beta tested it versions 2 - 4.1 so I know how really bad it was at animating. No one could even get a stable animation out of the Bryce3 beta - it wasn't until 3.1 that it would stay up long enough to animate. The AML is fine but it doesn't help when you get random camera keyframes showing up or kinks in the motion paths. We taught people at our Brycecamps to always parent the camera to a cube or sphere that is animated. The camera itself (even according to the developers) is not a good thing to try and animate. Animation wasn't even stable until 3.1 and it wasn't really stable until 4.1. I am on the Mac - it has always been more stable (since it went multi-platform) on Windows. Except for the dreaded windows Bryce2 release - that one really sucked for those guys. It was fully rewritten in Bryce3 whre it got better and faster on Windows and progressively slower and buggier on the Mac. Bryce2 (the Mac only version) was a speed demon and rarely crashed. Right now most of the crashes in Vue are openGL related, but they are getting the bugs worked out and the OGL in pro is far superior to the one in Bryce5 - I do like have fully textured and atmospheric openGL - especially for doing landscapes. E-on does listen to us and I am sure by year's end Vue pro will be everything we were hoping for. I just wish it was already there - I've got animations waiting for things to be fixed. Scott

Thanks for the Bryce history lesson! :) I actually like the animation tools in Poser. They easily outclass those of Vue and Bryce combined. The keyframing is EXTREMELY intuitive. It is very visual, and for a large percentage of animation simply switching between interpolation types (which are represented as different colors) does the trick. But then for tweaking they have a decent graph editor to boot. Selecting key frames and sliding/moving them is so easy to do and see, unlike Vue. Oh, and you can actually cut and paste keyframes. Not sure what E-on was thinking there. There are a number of items that just baffle me (especially in something call and intended as "PRO") as to how they are left out. Multiple undo's is another shining example. Then there's the non-standard axis (which drives me totally nuts), then ... ok, the list goes on. But so do my hopes. -Tim