anyone done pbr on the landscapes yet?

Mistara

i'm deciding if the omens are auspicious for pbr ing the terrains and landscape native presets.
replacing the fake gi ing with hdr domes

is it too taxing on system resources?

does ground shaders with displacement alleviate the twinklies in animation?

at a crossroads, dont which way to go with my animation workflow

the drawback to not using realistic skies is animating clouds gonna be more work,
can point force blow volumetric clouds around?  i've used point force on hair, but thats about it.
motion paths in the sky?
i havent learned how to control the speed on a motion path

DesertDude

Mystiarra said:

i'm deciding if the omens are auspicious for pbr ing the terrains and landscape native presets.
replacing the fake gi ing with hdr domes

is it too taxing on system resources?

does ground shaders with displacement alleviate the twinklies in animation?

at a crossroads, dont which way to go with my animation workflow

the drawback to not using realistic skies is animating clouds gonna be more work,
can point force blow volumetric clouds around?  i've used point force on hair, but thats about it.
motion paths in the sky?
i havent learned how to control the speed on a motion path

 Misty,

Sorry, I don't have experience with pbr and next to zero experience using hdr domes. Maybe someone who does can chime in.

Meanwhile, using ground shaders with displacement will most likely not alleviate the twinkles, but it all depends, there can be many culprits contributing to the 'chattering' or 'buzzing' or twinkling pixels, and sometimes even rendering using maxed out settings won't squash the problem. Give me some time to come up with some step by step examples and let's see if we can narrow down your troubles.

Regarding animating clouds, Volumetric Clouds can be animated. Here is a screen grab of animatable parameters.

If you want to animate the shape over time move your playhead down the timeline and drop a value in the 'Animation' box. I found the values have to be rather high - that test of 3000 was too high which looked a bit flickery. And if memory serves me correctly one of the Cloud Shapes didn't animate smoothly - it did stutter.

regarding Motion Paths, I just changed a Volumetric Cloud to Motion Path (Motion Tab > Motion > Motion Path

You then have to draw a motion path using the tools that should appear on the far left of the screen - that's where they appear for me, under the magnifying glass tool.

Then move the playhead down the timeline and adjust the 'Distance' slider at the top of the Motion Path controls to wherever you want your object along the path.

Mistara

thank you very much!!

distance is the secret to speed.

and that is more flexibility with the clouds then i thoguht.  i thoubht all it had was translate and rotation

Diomede

@DesertDude - lots of great tips, there - thank you.

DesertDude

Cool, thanks Misty and Diomede, glad it could help.

I rendered a bunch of tests yesterday using a simple set up with 2 terrains and (terrible) Background witha gentle Camera push forward. I started with standard size of 640 x 480 and default render settings. Looked awful, buzzing all over. Worked all the way up to the best settings and results were still awful at that size.

So, doubled the size to 1280 x 960 and tried various settings and reduced to 50% in post. Only with anti aliasing set to Best and both Object and Shadow Accuracy to .05 did I get decent results, but still some noticeable noise, especially in the foreground.

So, I kept increasing the size until I got results that I thought were nearly perfect. All tests had AA Best, and Object and Shadow Accuracy both at .05.

Here is a link to a comparison test.
Even though I made a high quality video to upload to YouTube the compression butchered the video and introduced a gazillion artifacts, so I uploaded a version to my own site here:

http://www.giraffeskullstudio.com/assets/comparisons_web2.mp4

It consists of 3 of the best tests, each looped twice.

First Test: 1280 x 960 reduced by 50% in post - 54 minutes
Second Test: 1920 x 1080 reduced to 67% in post - (illegible, lol)
Third Test: 2560 x 1440 reduced by 50% in post - 4 hrs 9 minutes

Next will make a small landscape test lots of grass, bushes and trees and anything else that highly contributes to noise when animating.

 

 

 

Mistara

hills looks calm.

i never imagined having this problems animating landscapes.