I am happy to report that (as some of you may already know, but I didn't) that texture anti-aliasing appears to work beautifully on default procedural textures. No more "electric-spazz" during animations. However, render-times are attrocious. I am rendering an 852x480 image with hi-quality settings, but even on my 4-computer 3.2GHZ render farm, 4 seconds of 30fps animation is taking like 36-hours. Time to adjust some settings I suppose.

UNFORTUNATELY, the stars in my sky are rapidly blinking on and off. And before anyone says it ... NO, twinkle is NOT set in the Atomposhere Editor options, and this is not a natural twinkle.

I am doing network rendering and this has produced bizarre results before, and leads to the frustration many of us feel that makes Vue Pro very UNproffesional, IMHO. But normally rendering to images sequences (a opposed to AVI) removes most irregularities. Anyone have a clue how to stop this star "spazzing" issue. It's obviously not a texture-map problem.

Thanks,
Tim

Does it happen always, or only when camera moves? And rendering to bitmap sequence eliminates the problem or not?

Message edited on: 09/17/2004 04:15

When the camera moves (the camera is ALWAYS moving ... heh-heh). No, rendering to image sequence does not help. I posted this on the Vue forum and someone said it was apparently another bug (go figure) within HyperVue/Rendercow. Only solution appears to be to turn off stars or render on one machine. They should fix this soon I would hope ... it is completely unacceptable.

I'm not sure about the hypervue bug. Have you tried to render to a larger size? Try to render a few frames at, say, 10241024 or 12081280 then compare stars are tiny points, but to be realistic they have some "flare" (I hope it's a correct word) and it is possible that the flickering is due to insufficient pixels in the render - when the camera moves, if the renderer has too few pixels at hand it must choose if to render the brigther centre or the flare. That may be a posible cause. We'll find out if true or not if you render larger.

This is an 852 x 480 render (fairly decent size). The thing is, I believe it doesn't happen when you render on a single machine. I'll verify when I have a chance, but am waiting for a 14 hour render to finish.

I have the same problem...I believe it's an old issue, but also an old pain! I once had to render a starfield as a texture onto a giant dome - it looks quite acceptable, even if it feels rather...dumb.

The new update (build 272334) may solve the flickering starfield issue, but if it doesn't (which wouldn't surprise me), it seems that it is now possible to render to RPF (Z/G-buffered) again, so a starfield could be rendered as a separate pass and then composited into the scene later. Of course, you'd need a compositing app such as After Effects or Combustion...

Oh, and you're right. There's no flickering when rendering on a single machine.

Good idea to utilize the G-buffer. A simple pass rendering only the sky wouldn't take long at all on a single machine. My stars are peaking through some clouds ... would that present a problem? I'm a vetern AE user, but have had limited experience using it with G/Z-buffer data. Thanks, Tim PS> What's the scoop on the build that's coming out ... is there a "news release" on it somwhere?

Well, I'm a Combustion user myself, so I wouldn't know how AE handles it, but you should be able to set the offset and/or scale in the Z-buffer within AE. That way, you can 'push' the starfield behind the rest of the scene. As for the clouds, they will probably have a transparency channel, so that shouldn't be a problem. I'll try it out and get back to you.

The build is out now!
If you go to e-on's website, click on:
Support->Software updates->Vue4Pro->Get update

old bug. e-on doesn't care. Vue 4, Vue pro and vue 5 have this problem and vue 5 hasn't even been released! Bad customer support.

How do you know Vue 5 has the problem? Are you beta-ing it, or are you just assuming since they don't seem to care. LOL! I can't believe they have the audacity to call something PRO, expect professionals to use it, and then ignore glaring bugs like this that makes renders unusable. Pathetic.

I'm no Vue expert, but perhaps you could try rendering with some motion blur? That might help your twinkling stars.

I always use motion-blur -- is there any other way? ;)

No, it's a Vue bug ... it's just been verified on the Vue Forum and by a tech at Vue. Hopefully the developers can fix this quickly ... but so far they have been ignoring it.

The patch didn't fix it? How hard can it be to fix that bug!

I don't think it's a question of difficulty ... I think it's a question of importance. Apparently things like "having renders work properly" are pretty low on their list, to make room for features like meta-blobs in Vue 5.

What's amazing to me is how they can see having something render properly as a low priority ... especially for software they think professionals should use. Coupled with the crashing and other bizarre behavior it's a total joke.

But the question is ... how in the hell did this get past QA in the first place? Do they test ANY of their features at Eon?!? This is a basic feature for pete's sake.

I couldn't agree more...I feel the same way about the RPF export. I've heard similar sentiments from other users. How about a "QA before features" petition.. g

You know I'll sign. :)