Issue with flickering

[Brian Jones]

It doesn’t look like you have the sort of scene that benefits greatly from GI, try it without. What are you saving to (or are you getting that banding in the initial renders too?)

[Brian Smith]

I am rendering to an external HD, but the banding happens when I do a preview render within C4D (command+r). Without the GI, the reflection of the floor isn’t nearly as nice, but the flickering does go away. Would it be worth my time to try my GI settings in Stochastic mode and crank up the stochastic samples to try and limit the noise? I took your advice from a long time ago and got an 8-Core. So I can background render while I’m working on stuff for my actual job (not my freelance) so rendering time isn’t really an issue. (For once…)

Also, any thoughts on the anti-aliasing issue? My AA settings are:

Antialiasing: Best
Filter: Animation
Threshold: 90%
Min/Max Level: 1×1/1×1
MIP Scale: 10%

Thanks!
-Brian
https://www.renderedhero.com/MC_SuperHandles-Intro_v1noGI-H264.mov

[Brian Jones]

Try and fake the GI first. Put a dim light under the floor (pointing up) with no shadows and it will illuminate the bottom of the ball like the GI was doing and it should give the nice reflection without the nasty shadow interactions.

Is the banding in the ‘fog’ rendering that way or is that a compression artifact in the samples you have posted? Pardon if I’m getting repetitive, I just want to be sure. The fog banding I see would either be compression artifacts or you are using Volumetric as opposed to Visible and the Sample distance is too high.
AA best on edges should be good but Animation filter will less sharp but that’s the necessary price to avoid AA flicker. Are your texture resolutions high enough that edge chunkies are not just because the texture is to low rez?

[Brian Smith]

The light under the floor helps alot. I had to readjust some of the reflection properties of the floor, but it works well enough.

The light was Volumetric, so I changed it visible and it still has the banding. (I am judging this based on the command+r render view. There is no compression on this at all. I tried intervals of 10 from 1 to 100 on the sample distance, and the only thing that seemed to change was the render time. The banding is still there. I wouldn’t be so concerned about this, but this is eventually going into a DV sequence in FCP, and will ultimately have a DV Compression applied, so the source media needs to be as sharp as possible.

The textures are pretty high res. The ball texture is 8-Bit .bmp at 826×816. The lines on the floor are the same but settings, but the dimensions are 3334×6667. They were also created in Illustrator, and unfortunately, it seems I can’t import vector graphics as textures. I have never had this much of a problem with AA before.

[Brian Jones]

[Brian Smith] “The light under the floor helps alot. I had to readjust some of the reflection properties of the floor, but it works well enough.

try turning off Specular for the light and compare Ambient Illumination checked on/off

There is no compression on this at all. I tried intervals of 10 from 1 to 100 on the sample distance, and the only thing that seemed to change was the render time. The banding is still there.

I see no banding in texts using the default Sample Distance of 25, going smaller would help but not bigger. Something else is going on maybe…

The textures are pretty high res. The ball texture is 8-Bit .bmp at 826×816. The lines on the floor are the same but settings, but the dimensions are 3334×6667. They were also created in Illustrator, and unfortunately, it seems I can’t import vector graphics as textures. I have never had this much of a problem with AA before. “

That should be big enough for the floor, probably for the ball too but remember it’s wrapping all the way around the ball in 826 pixels so as long as the ball is never more than 350 pixels wide in your shot it isn’t bigger than a 1-1 ratio of pixels.

You can use a vector as a texture that’s what Effects/Spline is for