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Nasty aliasing / flickering of lines in AE / E3D
Hello!
I have a problem which has been driving me mad all day! I also have a super tight deadline on this (tomorrow!) so any help would be very appreciated.
I’ve camera tracked some footage and using Element 3D, I’ve composited some models which were created in c4d. Especially when the camera is moving slowly, or when the models are in the distance, I get nasty aliasing / flickering on the lines.
In order to get the model from C4D into Element 3D with the lines, our 3D guy had to convert the splines to polygons, set a new material to them and then bake it out of C4D. I then imported the c4d file into e3d. We used this work-around as you can’t bake the toon & shade effect.
I’ve tried everything I can think of to get rid of this, searched high and low on Google and Creative Cow but I can’t find anything which works. I’ve tried all the obvious like e3ds sampling & aliasing settings, fiddled with motion blur, added different types of blur, turned fx on and off, added the effect ‘reduce interlace flicker’ in AE, looked through all of e3ds settings but not found anything which fixes it. To be honest, I don’t know if it’s a problem with AE, e3d or c4d.
I’d really appreciate any thoughts and suggestions which might fix this – or even ideas on how to troubleshoot 🙂
Here’s a sample of the video: https://vimeo.com/158216419 PASSWORD = 123
Thank you in advance! Any help would be amazing as I have a super tight deadline on this (tomorrow! Wah!).
Anne-Marie
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11 Replies
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What do you have your multi-sampling and super-sampling set to? How high can you crank them before you run out of video RAM?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
At the moment it’s 8, 0. I have played around with these though – tried lots of combinations but with no avail. I even maxed it out to 32, 16 :-/
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Hi Dave,
I thought so… Trouble is the client is set on this look as it matches previous videos and current imagery.
I could try to reduce the brightness/contrast of the lines but I’m a bit stuck in regards to the thickness.
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If maxing it out doesn’t help, how about rendering it from C4D where you do have even more control over anti-aliasing?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Thanks Walter. Really appreciate the help.
I’m afraid I don’t know much about c4d… so sorry if I sound stupid! Is that a setting when exporting the model? I’ve pretty much finished all the camera tracking and compositing in AE so redoing it all in c4d isn’t really an option as I’m tight on time now. My 3D guy is busy with other elements too.
Is there anything else I could try? Maybe adding noise to the model?
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[Anne-Marie Alexander] “I’m afraid I don’t know much about c4d… so sorry if I sound stupid! Is that a setting when exporting the model? I’ve pretty much finished all the camera tracking and compositing in AE so redoing it all in c4d isn’t really an option as I’m tight on time now. My 3D guy is busy with other elements too. “
The idea would have been to render from C4D, then replace your Element layer with that. If you did camera animation in Ae, you would have had to send the camera back to C4D to get the motion to match.
[Anne-Marie Alexander] “Is there anything else I could try? Maybe adding noise to the model?”
Did you see any difference at all with the multi-sampling and super-sampling cranked up? If you didn’t see any difference, perhaps purging your cache might have helped?
There’s also the “FXAA Smoothing” feature in Element 3D, which is a pixel shader that tries to smooth fine edge detail. Maybe cranking that a bit, too, will help you.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
did you render interlaced?
Some things to try:
2. if the cgi is already interlaced, you can deinterlace it before AE rendering, then use Revision’s Re-interlacer to create motion estimated fields for progressive viewing so it won’t flicker. Import back into AE for composite.
3. use Revision deflicker
4. keyframe effect- fast blur so far away so it get less blurry the closer it moves toward camera. a fake depth of field
5. some parts of it actually move like moire.mask out the bad part, mediun effect for chroma blur,shutter blur the strobing, vibrance the lost color
https://f1.creativecow.net/6749/remove-strobing-blur -
Thank you – I’ll give the latter a go now, and talk to my 3d guy when he comes in 🙂
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Hi Chris,
No it’s not interlaced. Using the ‘reduce interlace flicker’ effect was a desperate shot!
Thanks – I’ll have another play with all now.
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Hi guys,
Thank you again for your time thinking about this. Nothings seems to work enough though and as I’m super tight on time I’ve decided to change the look and adopt a different technique.
I’ve turned off the lines on the c4d model in element 3d, then duplicated the layer and used a simple choker to create the outlines. I’ve lost a fair bit of the detail but at the moment it’ll have to do!
Lesson learned – if you want outlines, camera track and render in c4d.
Thanks again.
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