I have had a little dabble with the gathernode, but when i render the gathernode reflection colour is grainy, how can i get a nice smooth reflection from the gather node???? I have tried raising the samples on the gather node to 95 but this doesn't do much but add time to the render, and i have altered the render settings and plugged the gather node into everything but the kitchen sink (only because the connector to the gather node wont fit the plug hole,lol...). Is there a solution to smooth gather node texturing?????

Looking forward to an answer by someone.

me 2

me 2 BTW anybody knows a thread or tut where appears all the P5 - P6 nodes and examplesof their use?

easy as pie! just like when you use any special effect with firefly, it uses a blender method of creating the effect, or splatter method (whichever explains it better for you!) what you need to do is tell firefly that you would like it to look at all the pixels around the area, and change the colour appropriately! how is this done you say? easy and sloooooooowly! under your ADVANCED render settings you will notice a nice slider bar called Pixel Samples. the number set within this slider determines how many pixels AROUND the pixel that is currently being rendered firefly will look at before deciding the end colour of the pixel it is working on! WHAT THE??? simply put, if you want less grainy effects (gather, DOF, ray-trace sharp shadows) you need to increase the pixel samples so that the pixels that have not had the effect placed on them (due to the grain method) will be effected by enough of the pixels that HAVE had the effect on them. ok that wasnt too simple.... poser sets it to 3 as default and ups it to 5 on production quality. For effects such as these, set it to 8-12 or higher if your computer can handle it. the higher you set it, the smoother the image will appear, but set it too high, and you will lose detail! hope this is not only understandable, but most importantly helpful LOL

me3 waiting for response back thanks for explanation templargfx

Good question, good answer. Thank you templargfx. Rance

Attached Link: http://www.runtimedna.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=132995

This thread at RDNA might be useful

simply put, if you want less grainy effects (gather, DOF, ray-trace sharp shadows) you need to increase the pixel samples Increasing pixel samples increases the quality of effects that happen after the pixels are being shaded, like DOF or 3D motion blur. The quality of the shading itself is affected by the shading rate - lowering that will make gather and raytraced shadows render more precisely (and increase render time). What can also help reducing the grainyness of images is changing the post filter to a 2 pixel gauss filter instead of the default 1 pixel box.

Im amazed that i asked a question that was quite popular...lol... I will now go and give all of those methods a try, Thankyou all... i will post my results back here...

Ok here is a split image of the test render.... The right is the higher settings render and the left of the image is the standard setting that P6 default is set to. The other pic is of the Higher render settings... Note that although the settings are higher this does make a difference, but does not remove the grainy texture. Now if i increase the settings im sure this would solve the issue. But be warned.....the higher render settings took 10 times longer to render, so increaseing this will add HUGE amounts of time to your rendering, and for this test i stopped at going silly and wasting my life watching the slow rendering.... Hope this helps some of you..... and lets hope PC's get a hell of a lot faster so i can really push these settings to the limit without the fear of falling asleep.

and the settings...

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