(I wasn't sure if this belonged here or in the Poser Technical forum, so I tried posting in both... sorry if this is a repeat...)

Hi there. I recently tried to render a "mansion" scene. However, when I rendered the stairs (I am doing a slight horizontal and push in move), they get all rainbowy and flicker. Is this Interlace-flicker? Does it have to do with anti-alias, etc? Am I doing something wrong?

I rendered an uncompressed TIF file (and waited seven hours for the result...)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!! SKCgirl

Showing an image would help to answer.

Do you mean flickering on screen during
the render process, or rainbow effects
in the final image?

If the former, it's probably nothing to
worry about.

If the latter, sometimes Poser doesn't
quite know what to do with a complicated
object, especially when the mesh has facets
with 5 or 6 sides, or "degenerate facets".

UVmapper will tell you if those things are
present, and will try to fix them.
.

Message edited on: 03/28/2005 22:21

Basically what happens is that if I look at my "stills" I can see a shift from one to the next whenever there is a horizontal line involved. It is worsened when it is far away (and the lines are closer together) versus when it is up-close and the stairs are larger.

It gives off this "vibrating" type of flicker. I've attached a photo. If you look in the stairs, you can see the curves, etc. and it seems like in each still they vary a little, so that when it plays, it vibrates.

The textures are from DAZ (as is the model).

I am importing the stills to Pinnacle Edition.

I'm not sure what other facts would help... so please let me know if there's anything else for this puzzle.

Again, I thank you... I truly appreciate you considering my problem.

Sincerely, SKCgirl

Ah. You're talking about animation. That's definitely an aliasing problem in the strictest sense. The lines are so close together that they interfere with the scan lines of the monitor. Probably there's not much you can do about it. If the effect is really annoying, you could try shifting the camera angle so that the stairs are not so close to horizontal. Another option: use post-processing to blur the stairs and cornice just a bit? My impression is that they wouldn't be quite that crystal-clear anyway in a night scene, but then my eyes are gettin' old!

Darn. I was hoping that wouldn't be the case. Doesn't the "blur" really add onto the render time?

Does it matter whether I use Poser's render or Firefly?

So I take it this doesn't have to do with interlacing or de-interlacing? I've been trying to read up on that, and it doesn't seem like Poser has any controls like that (I believe I read that Vue does...)

Thanks again for the input, I guess now I can stop trying to "fix" it and find a way around most horizontal lines.

Take care, SKCgirl

what building is that at DAZ? I can't seem to find it...thanks

Attached Link: http://daz3d.com/shop.php?op=itemdetails&item=3176

Its actually the Fairytale Collection - Palace Entrance. I took the sides and flattened them out and made it into a mansion. I then created the "sides" the same way. The roof is from another building.

Its a really nice DAZ prop... its just those stairs... ugh.

well I thought it looked like the Palace entrance...but I haven't figured out how to flatten the side walls...hehe...but the roof was really throwing me off. Great job!

Thanks... Oh, I meant rotating the walls, not flattening them... sorry. Yeah, the roof was a challenging fix. Took a little longer than I care to admit.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2052752

ockham may be perfectly correct, skcgirl, but there is another likelihood...i cross posted this in the tech forum... skcgirl, I feel your pain. See my attached link. In Poser 5 and earlier there is a well-known "flicker" problem with animation. This is caused by issues with math not resolving to enough decimal places. There are various approaches to attacking. Stewer, a wise Poser vet, recommends reducing the bias on shadows, and others 'scale up' the entire scene in an attempt to push math calculations away from the decimal problem. I have found that to be successful in most cases, but stewer tells me that 'if you solved it by scaling up, you ought to have been able to solve it by lowering the bias.' All of this may be moot for me personally; stewer told me that Curious Labs addressed this flicker issue in Poser6 and that it is solved. I am always setting up just the kind of scene that irritates this flicker, so I will be putting the supposed 'fix' to the test in the next few weeks, after my copy of Poser 6 arrives. ::::: Opera :::::

Interesting... I will definitedly read that post... I am currently downloading Poser 6... maybe I'll see if that will help it, if not, I'll try plan B. Thanks so much for the heads up... I searched all of the forums and didn't see that post. I'll let you know if it helps. Thanks again, SKCgirl

If my thread does not help, search on the word 'flicker' and you will see a ton of posts related to this problem. ::::: Opera :::::

Flicker, huh? I'll do that... since all the other keywords didn't help. After my Poser6 download finishes, I'll try the scaling thing... I'm a little afraid to see the render time, though. I read your post... hope the movie is going well... Thanks again, SKCgirl

skcgirl.... I highly suggest: Do NOT scale up in Poser 6...your problem may be solved in P6 without doing ANYTHING! Suggest you try your exact same render in p6, perhaps not the entire 7 hours, just a few frames that will demonstrate that the flicker has or has not been solved. Can yu post after attempting in P6? Note that scalling up does NOT affect render time whatsoever. ::::: Opera :::::

So far its not helping...Although I haven't had time to play with all of the settings.

I'll continue to do tests and I'll definitely post and let you all know what happened.

G'night. SKCgirl

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1987057

That is the same problem with buildings, "Glass windows" Hope this helps (URL)

In this case it looks aliasing generated by fine geometry, so scaling, lower shading rates or texture filtering won't help anything. What could help is changing the post filter - set it to two pixels size, gauss type. That should make things better already. If that still doesn't satisfy you, increasing the pixel samples - I wouldn't go over something between 6-8, though - before you go higher than that, try a 3 pixel gauss or sinc filter first. Don't worry if your still renders might look blurry - as you're doing an animation, such fine detail will get lost in the motion anyway. Depending on your taste, you may also want to try 3d motion blur - IMHO, it helps making animations more natural (= looking like real film instead of computer generated). Oh, and these tricks will work only in FireFly - the Poser 4 renderer, like so many others, is unfortunately tied to a 1 pixel box filter which is not very good at antialiasing.

Try enabling texture-filtering in your Render Options, and/or increase the pixel samples in your Render Options. A small amount of 2D motion blur might help, also.

I think 3d motion blur should render faster than 2d motion blur, as 2d motion blur is rendering multiple passes, 3d motion blur is doing just one.

I think Poser's 2D motion blur is faster, myself, but I haven't conducted any empirical tests to verify. And that's a shame, too, because I invested in this nice, shiny digital stopwatch recently ....

Hey there. Just letting you all know that I haven't forgotten to reply, I've just been working day and night trying to get my project out.

I JUST turned it in... and I ended up just doing a straight horizontal camera pan to avoid the horizontal lines from shaking. I noticed that if you don't cross the true x axis, the motions don't get blurry (I know its a low-tech solution, but it helps.) Similarly, for verical moves, you don't cross the y-axis (who says geometry doesn't help in real life?)

But since I had a sweeping move (which encompasses both vertical and horizontal), I put a semi-transparent box with some text to cover it up. It definitely masked it, so I think that the blurring ideas (2d, 3d blur, etc.) may help out... I just didn't have the extra time to experiment.

I will definitely try the ideas posted, and I thank you all!! I guess I'm not alone in this problem, and will definitely keep posting and trying to solve this issue....

Take care, SKCgirl