I'm feeling stupid because I spent a lot of money on a new 64-bit multi-core system so I could take advantage of Poser Pro 2012 and its many nice features, like IDL.  But I olny do animations in Poser, not stills, and was extremely dissapointed to find that you cannot use IDL in multi-threaded renders and must in stead cripple your system down to one thread when rendering.

While hoping that SmithMicro corrects this glaring weakness that keeps Poser Pro from being anything near "pro" in the animation world,  I was wondering if any of the Poser gurus out there might have a work-around suggestion for how to animate using IDL and mult-threaded rendering without getting the light flickering that Poser Pro 2012 curently suffers from?

"you cannot use.."

by that do you mean it simply will not render at all, or that when you DO render the differences between frames are such that you get flicker?

finalRender is a ~$1300 professional add-on renderer and has suffered from the same flickering in animation for half a decade, i think they just recently resolved it -- not sure, i havent used it in years. 

AFAIK its due to the fact that both renderers use samples and then interpolation for the rest of the lighting calculation for faster rendering, as opposed to 'true' GI which calculates the path of every single ray of light and takes forever to render.

path tracing, wantz  :biggrin:

It's actually irradiance caching, not IDL, that you're dealing with.

There's no free lunch here. IC is a speedup that you use in exchange for quality, accuracy, and consistency. You decide how "wrong" you are willing to allow the render to be, and you get a big speedup. Since IC is a monte carlo technique, the results are, by definition, random and inconsistent.

If you set IC to 100, you disable it because then you're saying you want the IDL calculation to be 100% correct. You can then use multiple renders to spread the load. However, the load will be hundreds of times bigger.

Hopefully this comment will not be seen as rude....

May we ask why you wish to render with IDL for animation? Can you post a cell please, so we can see the quality you are looking for?

Terry, Ignore if rude.

::::: Opera :::::

OK.  I'm learning some things.  Thank you all.

Might there be a way to still do a multi-threaed render using IDL via some settings manipulation (like a lower IC value?) and not get the flickering (I get it it on some, but not all surfaces), or are these two things just mutually exclusive?

i bet, per BB's explanation, that it won't matter what you set ILD to, if Irradiance Cache is not 100%

"FinalRender is a ~$1300 professional add-on renderer and has suffered from the same flickering in animation for half a decade, i think they just recently resolved it -- not sure,"

Yes This "Flicker" issue  is a long standing one even with expensive "Pro "Applications
Right now Vray using True GI is the only engine I know of that can do it flicker free  without resorting to some ridiculously expensive high end solution like Arnold.

"Hopefully this comment will not be seen as rude....

May we ask why you wish to render with IDL for animation?
"

This is not a "rude comment"

I have had access to various GI engines for over ten years and not once did I ever seriously consider rendering my character animation work ith IDL or GI not even for film clients.

Unless you have access to a render farm you are better off  using a  good standard lighting set up for animation renders and  color grading and enhancing  the footage in a post app like After Effects

IMHO

Cheers

sorry Terry,

as all said: it's either IC=100% or single threading or flickering or no IDL, to be perfect.

So the question is, whether IDL + IC < 100% + Multithreading + Indirect Light Quality way up reduces the flickering to an acceptible level, and what the noise reduction functions in your video editor can improve on that. Because when I digitize a video tape, I get a lot of noise and flickering too which can be suppressed to reasonable levels. Just thinking out loud, the world doesn't end at Poser. And as there is always a positive side on things: old film styles depend on flickering :)

makes me curious to the result, though...

Hi wolf, yes I was not asking him so I could learn, but to draw him out.

I guess he might want to give us his cell rendertime budget.

Lately I have been rendering animations in Poser with only the Preview enigine: just to get the characters' movements, and cloths and hair flying around. Then batch processing the resultant image sequence heavily.

After Effects yes, but i am into PostworkStudio Pro.

::::: Opera :::::

"May we ask why you wish to render with IDL for animation?"

Simply because using IDL seems so much easier to set up than the regular Poser lighting method in order to get the effects I find visually appealing.  After struggling with Poser's lights ever since Poser 4, I really liked IDL.  Too bad I apparently won't be able to use it unless I want to endure extremely long render times hobbling along on one thread on my new multithread-capable system.  Kind of like having a Ferrari but not being able to get it out of first gear.

Sigh...

Reality sets in, but life goes on.

I'll play around with the Poser Render settings and try some things in my video editing program (Premiere CS6) to see if that reduces some of the surface flickering to an acceptable level, but I really think I'm back to the world of standard Poser light rigs again.

Thanks to every one for paitently helping me learn some things.

Quote ... After struggling with Poser's lights ... /Quote

Fair enough, but when you turn the question into: How can I get lighting like (your example) without using IDL - we might be of help as well. Why struggle alone?

show us a cell

Nor can I produce the same image twice in a row, PERIOD, if I do not use irradiance caching.

They produce different problems. With IC, I get corner artifacts and variations in luminance. Without IC, there is general grainy noise everywhere.

It's all a question of visibility - hiding the problems. You cannot make them go away unless you buy a much more capable renderer and you allow it to spend 24 to 48 hours per frame. This is why Pixar does not use IDL to make a movie.

Use more direct light and you'll see it less. Use more busy textures and you'll see it less.

On the other hand, as in this render, if you use smooth white objects, with or without IC, and strictly light using IDL (envsphere) you will never get the same image twice.

Here is first render.

Do a flip comparison - be surprised. Nothing to do with multithreading.

smooth can be achieved....such as in this Modo render

http://www.luxology.com/gallery/video/view.aspx?id=58

but at what cost, and for what purpose. I'd bet they used 100% straight raytrace for that.

Animation is for story telling. The artist must "animate" (bring to life) the human gestures that convey meaning. This is a far diffeent mission that for a still.

"smooth can be achieved....such as in this Modo render
http://www.luxology.com/gallery/video/view.aspx?id=58
but at what cost, and for what purpose. I'd bet they used 100% straight raytrace for that."

Yes note how he only rendered 3 seconds!!

"Animation is for story telling. The artist must "animate" (bring to life) the human gestures that convey meaning. This is a far diffeent mission that for a still."

Well Said John, For my purposes I have established a 7 min per frame standard
anything beyond that and start to optimize the scene or investigate rendering passes of separate elements with alphas for compositing in post.

Hmmm...his thread has got me curious now
I have this set of excellent HDRI presets for Cinema4D
 
 http://greyscalegorilla.com/hdristudio/

and it includes a preset that claims "Flicker free GI rendering"
using C4D physical "Sky sampler"

I think I shall test that "Flicker free GI rendering" claim tonight with an imported IPP poser figure standing and talking with gestures.

Cheers

I just put both images in Photoshop - Difference Blending mode, and adjusted with full brightness (+150) full contrast (-50). Good example.

Still thinking out loud, why should SM advice single thread mode against flickering? It might be justified.

Just for the sake of it: did you render both single threaded? As it might be the case that the random generator starts with the same seed every image, and after that every thread goes its own way sort of independantly (thread 2 won't start always at the same timing diff from thread 1 etc), which might result in having no flickering between images when running both single threaded (same start seed + single thread=repeatable monte carlo process).

that's a 3x "might", i know.

     OK, I haven't taken the time to read the whole thread (I'm just grabbing a bite to eat, then it's back into the attic spaces running cable), but my experience is this:  Sometimes, increasing irradiance cache can reduce the flicker to the point where it's no longer an issue.

     Otherwise, you can try rendering out the series of frames three times, and compositing/averaging the three renders for each frame.  Make each render an object/layer of 33% opacity (well, the bottom layer would be 100% opaque).  This smooths out the random seed effect considerably.

@seachnasaigh

averaging out is a good idea, I guess premiere can do that even on video tracks. But I do think it requires lossless files formats, as averaging on JPG/MPG/AVI might not be the best of things. Or am I wrong in that?

     Well, I always render separate frames as PNGs, never rendering an AVI or Flash directly from Poser.  PNG is lossless and has object/layer capability, so it should do well as a format (TIF if you're on a Mac).

     When I use this technique, the layered objects are the rendered PNGs of each frame.

Indeed you Gentlemen are on the correct way of approaching the flicker problem
in fact here is a quote on how VRay deals with it:

"To avoid flickering frames, Vray introduced time-interpolated irradiance maps as part of SP2. The primary function is to reduce the amount of flickering that occurs when using the irradiance map GI method. It works by blending a range of samples from several irradiance maps causing a smoother transition between frames. The range is determined via the interpolation frames parameter."

At any rate I have begun my  GI animation test render I
got it down to about 2 min 15 sec per frame by lowering my sample from 150 to 125
I  shall post the resulting animation clip tomorrow

Cheers

Anyway ,for what its worth, here is My attempt at a "flickerless" HD GI animation render.
HD SPEAKING ROBOT 18 SECONDS

I had to use "Draft Mode"in C4D with much lower samples and it still held my  ancient machine "hostage" from anything more intensive than web browsing, for nearly 19 hours!!.

While I can Probably use GI animation for Motion graphics such as TV idents etc.
It would not be practical for complex character animation with multiple  rigs & scenery with camera moves.

Cheers

Looks good Wolf, I didn't see any flicker. Gotta ask, is that your voice?

"Looks good Wolf, I didn't see any flicker. Gotta ask, is that your voice?"

Hi thanks
That is not my voice BTW we use
THIS PROGRAM 

to create computer generated voices of many nationalities
you input your text and it outputs an aiff sound file for use in DAZ mimic

Cheers

sorry to spoil the fun a bit but I do see artifacts in the areas that were shown to be flicker-sensitive in BB's example / my difference post.

Those artifacts however migt as well be due to: draft low sample - quality (jagged edges, low AA), and H264 mpg compression (smoothing background variation), and are not that visible since those areas (shadow between object parts in the bot) are moving.

so I would like to see the robot standing still in a final high quality take, for the sake of this thread.

On the other hand, the take shows very well that the flickering we're discussing in this thread is not the worst effect of all. But that might be different for the results the OP is working on.

HI
You are correct those "jaggies" and "Dirty shadows are the result of rendering on Draft quality to get my per frame time down to 2.5 min on average.

But the Dirty shadows in particularly are quite consistent overall in each frame which was the goal of my little test.

at any rate here is a full quality render at about 13.5 minutes per frame which, at nearly 600 frames would not be acceptable for me unless a client was paying a $$premium$$

Cheers

Quote - smooth can be achieved....such as in this Modo render

http://www.luxology.com/gallery/video/view.aspx?id=58

but at what cost, and for what purpose. I'd bet they used 100% straight raytrace for that.

I don't know how old that example is (or which version of modo it was done in) but it could have been a GI render, Modo has a render mode specifically for flicker-free walkthrough animations in which it only does GI calculation once, then re-uses that for all subsequent frames. It's obviously only useful when the camera is the only moving thing in the scene (if you move any lights or meshes you need a fresh GI calc) but it makes for very fast and flicker-free walkthrough renders.