sketch & toon

[Mylenium]

There’s no real way around that. Since S&T is a post effect based on the visible contours and facing ratio of objects, there wil lalways be some flicker (which is usually not a problem and wanted). You could try to change the line thickness and enable some of the “Modifiers” settings. Maybe you can find a good combo e.g. based on distance to a reference object. Also check the render panel. Sometimes making S&T calculations based on real world units by checking “Resolution independent” can solve such issues.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Joe Bird]

As Mylenium says, there’s no way around it, and most folks embrace this “defect” as being part of the hand drawn look, but… consider lowering your frame rate, even as much as one half of your regular speed. For instance, a 30fps render with S and T will probably shimmer more than shake… so the fix there is lower the frame rate.
You know, like cartoons….

[Snakeoil]

thanks for the info Mylenium and bear. I don’t mind the jitter as a whole, I just wanted to reduce it somewhat. I’ll try the res independent solution. The reduced framerate is an interesting solution too: like a 12fps hand drawn animation. I’m not sure it’ll work with the live action I need to comp it with, but I’ll give it a try. I’m pretty sure the answer is ‘no’ since it’s a post effect, but is there anyway to render out a sketch and toon look and remap it back onto the objects with body paint?

[Mylenium]

[snakeoil] “I’m pretty sure the answer is ‘no’ since it’s a post effect, but is there anyway to render out a sketch and toon look and remap it back onto the objects with body paint?”

It certainly is possible, but it may not always be feasible. Like all UV work you’d have to unwrap your geometry, create a clean UV map and then assign the rendered images to it. The real problem in that case is that your unwrapped UVs would have to form a perfect rectangle (since S&T works in screen space which always is rectangular) and you’d still need it to spread as evenly as you can. Tweaking your UV maps can cost you much more time than anything else, so you have to weigh the advantages against the limitations. Depending on what type of stuff you do, you may also want to look into creating outlines based on geometry by e.g. beveling and duplicating edges. You can even get some interesting “stroke” effects by jittering them with deformers.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Adam Trachtenberg]

The most effective flicker-reducing measure you can take is to disable strokes, but of course that limits a lot of what S&T can do.

Here’s a post I archived (I think by Tim Clapham)discussing ways to minimize flickering with strokes:

“if you need strokes, and have flicker issues, you best bet is careful tweaking and lots of tests. the options to best tweak are:

1)Join limit
2)START + Angle
3)filter
4) END + length and angle

These all control how the Strokes are created from the lines detected in terms of angles and such. It’s a sort of guessing and test game figuring out the ideal angle for the optimal results. While a test on a still may show no difference between a single degree angle, it could make a huge difference in an animation between a line joining another line or not.

Also, be really careful of the combine function in the lines tab of the render settings and sketch tags. This setting combines lines of different detection methods with the same shader. While this I once thought was always a good thing, I’ve since discovered a lot of popping is cause by a line from the outline meeting a line from the folds making a single stroke when at just the right angles when using combine that of course wouldn’t if not combined. this can cause popping as well.

If your using distort, be really careful to test whether closing strokes will work or not, neither closing nor opening is perfect so its really dependent on which is less worse in terms of popping. This isn’t a huge contributor to flickers and pops, but it can be on occasion.

A good piece of advice is to also try to avoid strokes that don’t match on both ends. like a stroke that is thick on one end and thing on the other. The less contrast before the start and end of a stroke, the less distinct two unconnected strokes will show.”

[Charles Brepsant]

Hey,

One work around to this – convert your objects to splines (select your objects’ splines, Mesh/Commands/Edge to Splines) and then animate at will – you shouldn’t have any flickering.