Uberenvironment Lights showing Mesh Grids

Timmoth

What's the deal with uberenvironment lights?
They make any Skydome's mesh, and some other mesh grids, show up in renders.

I can get rid of it by setting the Occlusion Colour to white instead of black, but that effects the shadowiness of details in the render, and makes things more glared in general.

Surely it's not supposed to be like this? What's everyone else doing to deal with it?

phcriado_50d0961ab5

I had the same issue. Try converting the skydome to Sub-D and/or increasing UE quality to the max setting. I found some models would act weird if not converted to Sub-D.

Timmoth

How do you do convert to sub-D, and how do you turn on high quality?
I see the high quality presets but what needs to be selelcted to apply them? if that's how it works?

Sedor

Do you have the UberEnv at High settings? When I do preview renders with low settings at the UberEnv I also get that lines, they always disappear when I render with high settings.

phcriado_50d0961ab5

Timmoth said:

How do you do convert to sub-D, and how do you turn on high quality?
I see the high quality presets but what needs to be selelcted to apply them? if that's how it works?

Go to the Scene tab, select the skydome, click on the icon at the top right corner with lines and a small triangle to display a context menu, there should be an option 'convert to sub-d'.

I have UE2 and it comes with quality presets, but regardless, you have to select UE on the scene tab, and check the properties. You'll find shading rate and max error sliders. Lower those to increase quality, shading rate 8, max error 0.1 could be, not sure cause I use the presets though.

But I suggest converting to subd first and checking if the lines are still there.

Cheers.

Timmoth

Thanks guys, I'll try it out when I get home from work.

Szark

Timmoth this might help with Uber Enviroment Learning UberEnvironment 2 Return To Topic

Kerya

Stonemason's idea:

hi guys..the artefacts people are getting on the skydomes can be removed by raising the bias dial in UberEnvironments paramaters.
-Stefan

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/6814/P75/#96752

Marshian

I had this problem too and had a very hard time diagnosing it. actually I'm still not sure what caused it although when it started up I was using the spot render tool very heavily. I was working with several scenes based on the same props and the grid was suddenly showing up in all of them. It was on my own skydome (sphere primitive) and some props I made thru Bryce and edited in Hexagon.

The grid did not show up on other peoples skydomes or on the outside of my skydome. Converting to Sub D did work but the props showing grids were huge and this would slow DAZ down too much. What finally worked was restoring render settings to default, the weird part is that none of the settings changed- I took a screen cap before and after and the render settings were exactly the same, just clicking the button worked.

Hope this helps some one- I'm back on the road to submitting this product.

Renpatsu

Shadow bias manipulation can be a very tricky part, as it affects other shadows as well and might leave unexpected results - I got some scenes that only work with a shadow bias of 0.1 or 0.2 and for these I cannot raise the bias to the suggested 0.6. Sub-D usually works good with good enough Uber Environment and rendering settings. The way I usually choose is to apply a shader that is capable of disabling "Ambient Occlusion" on the Sykdome surface, like e.g. uberSurface or uberSurface2.

Marshian

The shadow bias did help but did not get rid of the grid completely. By the way- my grid issue keeps returning, I have to keep going to default render settings to turn it off.

UberSurface is a great idea! For a product it might lessen some functionality for those not familiar but it's well worth disabling ambient occlusion if the props don't need it, which is my case. This would also lessen rendering times, I'm guessing.

Thanks- gonna go check it out now.

Szark

Yes using Uber Surface in combination with UE2 and turning off AO surface by surface will help.

Marshian

Hi People!
I'm developing this as a product and I'm so close!

Update- grid problem is not quite solved. I have three props in my scene and one is a sky/sphere. The grids are showing up when using UE2 and converting to UberSurface did get rid of it but the downside was a lot of tweaking to get all the surface settings back to how they rendered before (still not there) and almost doubling the render times. Adding a reflection setting greatly increased the difficulty of getting rid of the grid.

The grid is actually cool looking, especially on the props I brought in from Bryce. But it ain't workin' now.

I realized just now that the grids are showing up on the back or inside of all the props. It's easy enough to flip the two plane-ish objects so they face the camera (although I'd like the freedom to render from both sides). It's the sphere that I don't know how to flip inwards.

Post edit- the problem is inconsistent which is frustrating to troubleshoot. I'm still testing but it sometimes seems to happen in my renders after a heavy use of the spot render tool. Restarting DAZ sometimes seems to clear it up. Wacky!

Post edit-Problem solved- Raising UE2 Shadow Bias was the main key then reducing UE2 intensity and converting Sphere to either Sub-D or UberSurface (to turn off Ambient Occlusion).

NeilV_1

What causes this issue is that the prop is thin or low on polys by adding a level of Sub-D to the prop it adds more polys to the prop thus making it thicker and the grid does not show.

This is why this issue tends to show up more on sky domes than other types of props as these tend to be very thin and should be created with more polys to stop this issue from happening.