Bees in my Trees
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What is the trick to using the tree tool (either from the tool bar or from the browser tree types) so as to avoid the dreaded pixel glitter. It works fine with stills but whenever I try to pan or dolly the scene in a video clip the tree's leaves look like a nest of bees. Does this come with the territory..that is do all tree generators in other programs also have this problem ? Is it because there are so many leaf surfaces to calculate as it goes from frame to frame so that Carrara cannont make the transition smoothly ? Is there a motion blur that can handly this problem ?
Thanks for any input.
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This is most definitely not just a Carrara issue. Depending on your scene, motion blur can help, but I found the most effetive method is to render at double the size and reduce by 50% in post. You may also have to increase your rendering setttings, shadow accuracy and set AA to Good or Best. Try a test render of 1 second, or 15 frames or something...it doesn't take much to see if the "chattering" noise gets squelched. Also, you can't just take your noisy render and reduce it's size - your noise is already baked in there...It's been a while since I have dealth with this so there may be other helpful suggestions. Hope that helps.
Thanks DesertDude,
I have used that trick (rendering 2x the size then reduce) in AE to get rid of chattering in other footage. I have been playing around with settings a little. I will try what you suggested with the shadow settings. The reason I posted this question was that I had seen the control for wind settings for leaves in the tree controls and wondered if they could stop the glitter there when the leaves move , then was there some internal magic in Carrara for when the camera moves - for in both cases the leaves are moving.
Thanks for getting back to me ..I will stay with it.
Hi msteaka, even with wind settings I think the render might still be unacceptably noisey. (I do like your optimisim "...some internal magic in Carrara for when the camera moves...") I'm sure you already know in AE there is Remove Grain. Maybe you can reduce the noise in Carrara to the point where you can use such a filter sparingly and it won't ruin the detail?
If you have a moment, maybe give a sense of the trees in the scene? Are there thousands in a forest, or a few in the foreground only? Maybe the trees can be broken out of the scene and rendered separately? Maybe the specularity of the leaves is the problem, and maybe a render pass or shader setting change could help?
It is an incredibly annoying issue.
I think the key will be higher AA settings and/or rendering at a higher res and downsizing, both of which use more samples per final pixel. You should have some translucency on the leaves and may help as well.
Argh - now I "have a bee in my bonnet" about this. I am seeing some suggestions on Google that textures can also be the culprit for flickering vegetation. Maybe check to see if there is a bump map active, maybe it isn't needed. Also, I don't know if this applies to Carrara, but I see a suggestion that procedural textures may be prone to cause more flickering than an image map? I don't know if that is true but might be worth investigating.
I ran a test (just a tree) with AA at best and motion blur....The test ran fine even without changing the image size. I am running a one second test of the whole scene.. its 4 hrs / sec..1280x720 pix @30fps. If it works then itt looks like days of rendering ahead - groan....
Believing I would not be able to get rid of the pixel dazzel I was running parallel tests on making stills of the Carrara trees on alpha channels and then texturing them onto flat planes which are placed in the scene. As long as the dolly is not of too many degress of arc it works fine but not as crisp as I would like. But now that the 3D trees seem to be working.. its much better.
If this does not work..Then rendering the trees separately will be an option..but so far so good.
Thanks Phil for jumping in.. The high AA may have fixed it..will know soon. My first itme using trees...great fun.
Thanks guys.
The frames have rendered with no pixel dazzel that I can see. I am running it again only this time with an AntiAliasing of "Good". The best took 4 hours and the "good" gives an estimate of 1 hour. I have left the object and the shadow accuracy at default. If there is pixel dazzel, I will try what Evil has suggested and play with these parameters.
I am amazed that anti aliasing adjustment in Carrara is working so well. I have had footage in AE that has had pixel dazzel...and there is little that can be done about that I have come across.
Thanks, DesertDude, Phil and Evil for your help.
Bummer. I know that, to reduce/remove flickering of distant stars in Starry Sky, setting the Object Accuracy to 0.5 is key. So perhaps AA might work as well.
But boy oh boy... I'd like to see if I can help you get better render times out of this. Here are some of my discoveries towards rendering animations in Carrara.
#1 - Motion Blur - I find it to be best practice to not motion blur at rendeer time. First of all, it takes your render times and multiplies them by the number used for the blur accuracy - where higher numbers = better results. Yeah... it's cool that Carrara can do that. But the clean lines without it makes post work so much more accurate, since we get much better pixel contrasts on edges. Anyways... a nice clean render can result in a lot more control in a more real-time environment for applying blurs and any other filter or effect.
This is only an opinion, but it came from a lot of experimenting with rendering animations specifically. That goes for the rest of this too:
#2 - Reflection vs Highlight - Before adding reflection to a shader, ask yourself: "Do I need to see a reflection in this material, or do I just need it to be shiny?" Try going in on reflective shaders and turn off reflections in place of a Highlight channel setting of Value 1-100 set between 67 and 100, depending upon how bright the shine should be. Then set the Shininess channel. "0" will spread the Highlight channel evenly across the faces of the mesh and 20 - 50 will tighten the angle to create sharper gleans of light.
I used to always suggest starting with Highlight 100, Shininess 18 and work from there if I wanted something to appear shiny in the render, like the blade of a sword, etc.,
On this same subject, we also need to remove any unnecessary refraction, transparency, subsurface scattering, translucency and displacement as well. These are incredible features to have in a render engine, and I'm not saying to not use them at all... just to never have them activated when their not needed. Set the channels you don't need to "None" instead of Value = 0 or Color = Black. While the end result is the same in the render (theoretically) applying a result of 0 to reflection likely takes longer than to ignore the channel entirely.
#3 - Lighting vs Render settings vs Resolution - How high-definition do you really need? Not saying to Not go high-rez, but it takes a lot longer to go 1920 x 1080 than it does to render 1280 x 720, which still looks decent when watched on full screen - but when compared side-by-side, the difference is Very noticeable - so if you really want crisp HD at it's finest, then go with what you need. But decide by rendering the same, fairly short scene at both resolutions and compare the difference in render times as well as the difference in clarity. Very noticeable difference in both, so the decision can be tough - it was for me. I finally decided upon 1280 x 720 and I get renders done in a flash.
I bought some Howie Farkes kits early on in my Carraraing and there used to be these very informative instructions in "The Art Zone" here at Daz 3D, I know I've seen them around somewhere still. Well they come with his "Fake GI" light dome, his various settings that he uses as a default, and a lengthy explanation of his results by varying different aspects of the lighting vs the render settings, which is great stuff to study and create a Favorite set of Settings that you end up always using. That in itself is a huge time saver in the end... trust me!
I've modified that dome a million times over - combined with stuff I've learnt from mmoir's Mystic Gorge and Tim Payne's stuff... they have some amazing advice... Dimension Theory, too. Anyways...
Am I babbling on about stuff you already know and don't want me to continue? 'Cause I'll just keep going otherwise... but not if I'm way out-of-bounds here... ;)
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Tree notes - I've noticed that applying too much curve in the trunk, perhaps even other generations, can cause the whole tree to disappear - sometimes not apparent until animated with wind settings on it.
I was planning on experimenting with some of the elasticity settings....
I actually rotoscoped the animated background that comes with Woodlands, and used the rotoscope to paint in the trunk on frames where it flickered off. Works like a charm!
Dart,
Thanks for the great advice I have already put some of it to use. I am deep in running a number of tests on trees.... Geez they take a lot of render time...Just the trees nothing else in the scene. I am also running a parallel tests using a still image of a tree pasted on a vertical plane.... This looks very promising.it is nice and crisp in the assenby room but once you give it a quick render it gets fuzzy... Strange. I have played around with the parameters of anything I can get my hands on but it renders fuzzy. The texture map is 1084 x 860. I have tried using larger maps, smaller maps ..no effect.
I have renders cooking using Carrara trees..... Will post more when I get results.
Thanks again for sharing you wisdom. ... Meanwhile I Got to take my wife out to dinner...winter has been hanging on too long.. snow yesterday..rain today...a little cabin fever...
OOps I forgot the attachment.
Have you tried playing with the filtering options? Default is Fast Mip Map which supposed to reduce flicker for more distant textures, you might prefer something like Sampling, although if you increase sharpness, you might (ironically) get more flicker.
In the Render room, the "Filter Sharpness" parameter is 75% by default. That might be playing a role here.
I can now see why your trees take forever to render... they're fabulously detailed! Wow are those some nice looking trees!
For me, I have taken a preference of doing thing the Carrara way, and not using transparency maps to make leaves, using low-rez vertex objects with a simple, yet cool-looking shader. This all came down to me saying to myself: "Okay, this story is not about the trees, I just need trees in it", so I started working with them until I've come up with a faster tree. Before doing that, I even bought XFrog's billboard trees collections, which are just a great tree render with an alpha channel mapped onto a one-polygon plane.
Then I remembered that I had optimized mmoir's Mystic Gorge kit (still one of my favorite Carrara products to date!) to render incredibly fast and he has a quite a few nice looking trees in there. (He also includes some really nice tutorial notes if you find it and read it... I always do)
That's when I realized that we don't really have to worry too much on the trees themselves, but how we light and render our scenes. There are exceptions to that, especially pertaining to tweaking out the size of the leaves compared to how many get populated, how accurate we ask the trees' mesh to be rendered (doesn't need much to look like a great tree at a distance) and how many visible generation we use, and a big one being Translucency on leaves, which looks fantastic if the tree is the Hero, but otherwise, try some sort of fake Indirect Lighting to facilitate that.
So I tried taking Shadow Blur off of my lights and... BAM! Immediate renders galore! So here is where I've gone in to balance out whether I really care if I have blurred edges on my shadows or not. Yes, shadow blur can make a scene look much more realistic - especially if you're going for a beautiful still image. To me, I find that animations give us license to obliterate some common still image necessities and fake the effect in some other way.
So when we see people saying to "Never use the Ambient Scene Setting control - by setting it to 0%", keep in mind that these types of statements are mere opinions formed around a specific need - and that we all have different needs, so such things MUST be tested ourselves to observe the results. When I first started Carraraing, it was very much agreed upon across the board to NOT use Global Illumination. Nowadays we're seeing that being more of a common setting to use because it's so easy and has great results.
Global Illumination can be fast to render, too, as long as we take care to optimize the scene to take advantage of speed. Fake GI can be set up to actually take longer to render than actual GI if we're not careful - like giving the dome lights shadow blur, for example.
This subject reminded me of when I made the animated backdrop and accompanying scene file for my Woodlands kit. The tree was being bent a lot more than what I was planning, but I liked it except for the fact that it caused the trunk to blink in and out of certain frames, destroying the render. I had just seen a series of videos by Phillip Staiger on using the Rotoscoping tools of the Curve tool in Howler. So that was my first ever Rotoscoping job - and I loved it!
It's been a while since I've played with that scene and I was just working with my new LoRez Horse from Predatron, giving him a drudging, hard walk cycle - perfect fr walking through a storm with persistence! He begged me not to make him walk in the rain. So I used the animated backdrop from Woodlands, keeping him nice and dry, and added a nice big, low-density, rotating volumetric cloud and rendered out the animation.
Then I brought it into Howler and, using Pixelan's AnyFX plugin's animated simulation of rain to render the final layer of rain over the whole thing.
To make this GIF, I resampled the final down from 1280 x 720 to one quarter its size, saved as AVI (Full Frames), opened it in Carrara's Render room and saved as an animated GIF. Kinda cool how it all works!
For the record, I do love the Daz 3D Millennium Horse. I'm also a huge Predatron 3D fan. When I saw this LR Horse pack which comes with saddle, reins, gear, several map choices and a Unicorn version, I just had to collect it even if I decided to keep using Mil Horse. I love what I'm seeing with the DAZ Horse 2 as well, and may end up getting some of its support products as well. Never hurts to have extra possibilities for when the time comes to work on these things - if something goes amiss, there are other option to head to right in the library.
This LoRez Horse kit is really, really nice! I like LoRez (my CAR versions load so fast and render really well) and I'm planning on having a bit of a less-than-photoreal appearance to my work when all is said and done, so it really does pay for me to be taking advantage of these models. But even for realism renders, P3D intends these LoRez figures and props to be used in the background, where they end up looking beautifully realistic. Anyways....
Dart - the animated GIF is not showing for me, I'd love to see it, how about posting the higher res version on YouTube and linking it?
Dart
Thanks for all the info Sorry I could not get back sooner... The render of trees in carrara are very good..no pixel dazzel...but somehow they seem flat and monotone. This I suspect can be fixed by tweaking the lighting..However there is a tremendous render hit with these trees..If I was using them for stills it would not be such a problem. Or if I had a scene where there was say a flyby where you were seeing the tree from both sides..there would be no option but to use the trees in Carrara and take the hit. However for dollies that have only a limited movement..just enough to give the impresssion of 3D, I think that the option of doing the trees in post is very appealing. Anyway here are the results so far.
1. This is the render of the scene in Carrara using the settings AA best. with default OA and SA. There is no pixel dazzel but 4hrs per second. I ran the same scene with AA at good and Object accuracy at 0.5 and there was pixel dazzel. A lot depends I suspect on the size of the leaves. To give the impression of large trees I had them cranked down a fair amount. From what I can see, for video you have to go with AA of best and take the render hit.
2. Here a still image of a tree on alpha is used in After Effects in place of the trees in Carrara. The trick is to match this tree image with the camera dolly move in Carrara. Although there are methods for matching the camera movements in 3D applications..for me I find if I simply (A) place a flat plane in Carrara the size of the object (B) render out that plane to a movie (C) bring that plane into AE and drop it in the timeline over the background footage from Carrara. From here I corner pin the still image onto the flat plane. Since the plane is always in synch with the carrara footage the tree appears to be in the scene. It works if the dolly does not move too far. It is amazing how the eye accepts it as the viewers focus is on the movement of the figurs in the scene. The pallalax problems seem to go un-noticed - unless you really focus on the tree.
It seems I keep re-inventing the wheel....I just re-read Darts post...what I am doing is called Billboard..... There is really a lot of products on DAZ store..I had no idea about xfrog. I have been using Textures.com
I tried putting the tree texture map on the vertical plane in Carrara (billboard ?)..this would have avoided the post work in AE. Although the image is crisp in the Assembly room,,when it is rendered the image comes out fuzzy. ( see my attachment a couple of posts up where half the image is rendered) I tried the changes as Phil suggested using sampling and summed area table in Texture Map panel but it did not seem to do much. If Carrara could keep the texture maps crisp in rendering then there would be no need for post work in AE. I will keep working on this as I don't think you can beat using images of real trees when the movement is not too severe. Dart says that the Assembly Room filter is set for 75%....However when I render the scene out it is still fuzzy. Very puzzling that image is sharp before rendering and fuzzy after.
Dart, I agree spending too much time on the trees may be unneccessary while the focus is on the action of the scene. I think using the visual tricks you suggested make a lot of sense. Sometimes I think we try to do too much in the 3D program itself, and would be better off and much faster doing some of the scene effectrs in post.
I just bought the LoRez chickens ... I will be placing them in the farm yard..doing their walking and pecking thing. I was about to start making my own when I came to my senses. The horses pulling the hay wagon..which cannot be scene..but still are walking and pulling - (why did I do that).. and the horse being led in the farmyard background I made myself while the horse drinking at the water trough came from the Carrara browser. The pigs, sheep, and sheep dog I made myself...out of very, very low res vertex components... I was concerned about the rendering hits if I bought 3D models from the DAZ store. This whole scene has been a learning curve. And thanks to the generosity of the you guys on the forum..I have learnt a lot more.
Thanks all for your great input.
Carrara has a Primitve object called a"Splat",. it's a "double" plane , like an X or +,. you can apply a texture map to that splat and it aplies to bolh planes.
the difference between the single flat plane and a doube plane is that the double plane appears more three dimentional as the camera moves around.
You could also create your own "Billbiard" in the vertex modeller by creating two sqares or rectangles.
Hope it helps
Thanks 3Dage.. The problem is that the text map placed on the plane does not render with sharpness that is seen in the Assembly Room view. Whether rendered with the render tool or rendered out to video...the rendered texture is fuzzy or softened. I have not tried using splats...did not know about the x planes..Thanks
Neat Video is another possibility to get rid of bees. There is a demo version.
Coming in late on this, but couple things that might be helpful…
Filter Sharpness accentuates pixel artifacts but increases sharpness. The general recommendation for animations is to lower it or turn it off. I think this is even in the manual.
I have in my notes to use Fast AA for animations and Good for photos. Fast is a bit sloppy, but for camera animations that can actually help with the artifacts and is actually faster
If you’re using After Effects and the camera move is slow you can create your own camera/motion blur by compositing in a duplicate animation layer and advancing/retarding it one frame, blend 50% etc. You get the idea
If you’re rendering for AE, oh boy, you get to use “Sequenced .rpf” files as Carrara output (and set the Options for 4 frame numbers). With RPF you can use the “ID Matte” effect in AE to isolate individual objects in your scene! I think that only works with RPF. You can isolate objects in any MP layers you render, GI, Reflections, etc. Incredible tweaking power.
Here’s the basic idea for the ID Matte trick. I rendered 3 objects, RGB. But I changed the Red one to Purple in AE by finding its ID (4) trial and error, then applying a Color Balance (HLS) effect to just that.
Getting back to your Trees… you could exploit this trick to say create a duplicate layer in AE, advance it one frame and use the ID Matte to hide everything in that layer except for the tree, blended at 50% or whatever for motion blur on the tree only.
Hope I’m not restating the obvious.
Don
I think that, in the image you've shown above, with the rendered side being blurred, the blur may be caused by the lower Object Accuracy. Try that same test at 0.5 OA.
3Dage...Yikes the splat works...seems quite crisp... Why is the image sharp on the splat and not on a flat plane ?.. The only problem seems to be seeing them in the Assembly Room. The splat is invisable unless you stroke it with a render. If you have amoment could you explain how you make the x configuration...I can't seem to find that option.
Thanks for the tip
Aspin,
Thanks for the info on Neat Video...I will look innto it a little deeper as soon as I get time. If it works as good as the demos show.. it is definitly something I would want. I noticed it took out the thin horizontal lines in one of the demos.. If it can do that with some of the 3D lines stutter...that would be very valuable.
Thanks
In this (you've probably seen this before - it's old) the scene starts with a sky dome and then when we see Rosie riding through the trees, those renders did take some time per frame... I was new with Carrara then and I remember them taking fr longer than I wanted them to. The next scene is mmoir's Mystic Gorge and I remember that being my benchmark solution scene to go to because it rendered so fast.
So just for kicks, try loading a new empty scene and load in a default, basic tree and see how it renders.
In the vertex modeller,. if you create a Vertex grid,. and UV map it,. then duplicate that,. then rotate it so you have a 90 degree cross of the two "planes" to make a billboard.
the same principle can be applied in AE with either solid layers and masks, or images, and footage with alpha,. made into 3D layers and rotated and positioned where needed. I think it's also worth mentioning Element 3D (videocopilot.net) if you're uising AfterEffects,. you can import OBJ or OBJ sequences,. it's a replicator-ish perticle-ish system,. but much more than that.
I've done the same thing, except instead of doing it in the Vertex Modeler, I simply duplicated the single plane and rotated it 90 degres along the z axis. I've also experimented with a 45 degree rotation instead, and then Ctrl D twice more, so that I had a billboard image every 45 degrees... which I've deemed unnecessary.
Shortly after all of this, Dimension Theory came out with his Ecomantics - Efficient Ecosystems kit, so I bought that too. I love it. It's excellent for adding billboards or even larger boards, or even larger ones. It's pretty cool.
In the end, however, I've found that nothing looks better than good ol' Carrara trees. David Brinnen brought up how lucky Carrara artists are to have such a wonderful tool. Ever since, I've been having a lot of fun making new trees and using ones that I've picked up from Howie and mmoir - even from the basic plants that come with Carrara.
Took me a while to get it edited down for YouTube... but here 'tis! ;)
Dart - very dramatic!
He does have an important mission, hence the dramatic music (borrowed from "The Witcher 1")!