Sunday, 12 June 2011

It has been a few more days working on the shots 44-52. I should have the sequences wrapped by tonight. I am just finishing off Audrey’s lip sync. I am a little worried about Ian’s lip sync since you can’t really see under his beard before rendering. So hopefully the mouth movements are enough.
A little trickery I moved the camera of the end of the sequence of the close up of Darren so that it tallies with the start of the next sequence of Darren Elm, so the eyes and face are in the same place. It should produce a nice effect.
On the shot 57 cave sequence I had it all ready when I noticed on one shot Darren Elms teeth flicker. Looking online its possible it’s a light map issue so have increased that to 100%. Its possible this may be a fix. I also tried the lights to make sure they weren’t causing the problem with the shadow effects. Since one light uses mental ray shadows and the rest ray traced. However they do not appear to be the cause. Hopefully I will find the problem soon since the teeth flicker is quite noticeable, funnily though it doesn’t do it in the close up at the beginning only in the rest of the cameras when he talks.
I have noticed latter that it seems to be a problem with two shader’s, that use the same parameters. I don’t think it’s a light map issue which is suggested online, after rendering the same thing occurs and believe it may be a problem with that shader which was copied for the bone shader of the cowl that also flickers. Funnily though it doesn’t do it with the helmet that although in a completely separate shader set it was copied from the tooth shader to begin. So I am thinking if I redo the shader’s completely for the character it should work and it’s a bug with that shader set and those shader’s in it. Anyways I am testing it with default parameters, and if that works I am half way there.
http://www.digitaltutors.com/forum/showthread.php?18801-SSS-Flickering-please-help-!
It didn’t.
Ok some looks around the web latter and trying changing the render setting to Lanczos and min and max samples to 4. This didn’t work either, another post was on final gather settings, so I am trying rendering out the final gather map every frame, with this settings it may be easier to calculate the fall off generated on the character from the omni light and its falloff. It seems to be a fall off problem of the shadows.
http://3dsmaxrendering.blogspot.com/2008/04/why-does-my-animation-flicker_02.html

this didn’t seem to work and since I wasn’t using final gather to begin im pretty sure it wasn’t the problem. However I may try it again latter if I cant find the problem, in using the map pre-calculated then rendering off the whole sequence. However since I don’t really understand the setting I am unsure if this would work with a moving object. Anyway if the next test doesn’t work I will try that.

As off now I have increased the light map of the shader to 100%, the samples to 128 and turned on scatter indirect illumination. Hopefully this may work, but since the lights differ so much in the scene, with animated light sequences and moving skin, I worry that using a final gather pre calculated map might not work. But I am a novice in those areas so learn as I go I guess.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif112&id=10061676&linkID=9241177

http://ankitsurti.blogspot.com/2010/08/creating-final-gather-map-and-its.html

Another solution online was a problem with a combination of working out the light values in mental ray while the camera moves. So each frames it works it out again and causes some flickering between frames as the light is worked out differently. In final gather there is a process where it can work out the difference between 5 or so frames, therefore stopping the flicker. However for some reason in this sequence it isn’t working, even with a fixed camera.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=13823260&linkID=9241177

I have decided to render off the sequence as is, and come back to it at a latter time. Otherwise I will fall behind more with the sequences.