Hi!

I,m working for an Architectural visualisation firm, basically I'm starting out, quickly learned Vue5I and trying to bring this first project to a deadline.

Biggest concern so far is noise in animations, boss seem to be unhappy with that and neither am I. I've done quite a lot of searching and reading around CGTalk and here to see what people came up with. Indeed, I saw few animations that totally blew me away by hard rock solid they were, at first I could not believe it was actually Vue.

So far I came up with a little recepie to help to REDUCE the flicker but there is one scene I have, where camera slowly pans around a crossroad with fountain in the middle, all around is forest and some tress are up in front line. Lot's and lot's of noise on distant trees, more noise and front trees, grass used to be noisy as hell but I fixed it. So here are the settings I,ve came up so far but still UNHAPPY with :

User with Broadcast loaded to start with
Object AA min 2 max 30
Quality 75%

Texture AA min 2 max 30
Quality 95%

Moition blur Hybrid 2.5

Animation flicker removal ON,
Depth Blurring is on and I'm playin with it constantly, something like
1pixel radius, 20%

With all that, render times are higher than broadcast, slight improvement in Noise reduction but it's still BAD.

So here I though, maybe it's the WIND that's killing it all? Should I turn it all off, wind , breeze, etc? This will obviously make the moving picture much static, but maybe it will do the trick.

Tomorow I should start the final rendering of this scene, using 5 cows, 2.8 Xenons, will take 12 hours and it's my last chance, nore more time to waste.

I really would like to improve it . So is it the wind?

Also, I noticed that Distance bluring will always blur up front too, no metter wha the settings are. Bring everyting out of focus slightly, so I'm no crazy about it. Maybe Z-depth posprosecced in Aftereffects to blur out all the backgroung?

Thanks a lot!

I remember that Ryan Spaulding (another pre viz architecture guru) had a large thread whilst exploring the various render options, which you might be able to search for here.

Philippe Bouyer of Belino.net posted some of his tips for removing flicker in animations- i'm attaching his suggestions, but the main trick is to Remove Texture AA. and Boosting Object AA.

In my own efforts, I find that less is more, and that it is often easy to get tweaking too many parameters at once, so I often hide everything else from the render and just concentrate on one object to better understand each incremental change I make.

Good luck - do let us know how you get on?

Kind regards

I wil surely let you know, and thanks for taking time and posting that.

I did some concentrated testing at home last night , basically I found that Ultra finds the best result - Dohhh!!! And superior yelds somethnig much cleaner than brodcast but not as clean as Ultra, but still much better. So I took Superior as start point for my user settings, boosted OAA a bit more, applied Mblur and took those settings to the office this morning and started the rendering. 17 hours on 5 Xenons, so tomorow morning will be the moment of truth.

But the thing about Not using Texturing AA at all opening just another can of worms for me. But that is what I was so missing. But can this be possible, not using it and getting cleaner results, it's too late for this current scene to try it out but maybe for the next one.

Anyway,. I will post tomorow on how  it went.

I have two more animations to render for this project, one involving a camera flying low over a lake, that's another noisy issue.