[Brian Jones]

Your Particle Geometry object’s Particle Group is set to Main so it only was acting on the Main group not the Frag group, either you need a second Particle Geometry object set to Frag or set the first one to All (or nothing) so it will work with any group.

[Brian Jones]

A google of bips is interesting, not the 70’s punk band I’m guessing 🙂 Maybe BIPS: Bayesian Inference for the Physical Sciences? Where have you heard of bips?

[Brian Jones]

Cloth collision is working fine if the collider stays still, if the collider moves then there is a simple workaround 3DKiwi put out there – apply a Point Cache tag to the moving (animate it first) collider then click Store State then Calculate and it works – You can even change the collider’s animation and it still works with no recalculate.

[Brian Jones]

Don’t know boujou myself but a quick google search got this https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/19/861633
which might be a place to start

[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

[Brian Jones]

Selection set could work if you selected all the faces did an inner extrude, take a selection set from the inner faces and apply a white texture and a black texture that uses the selection set.

another way would be to make a square texture black with white edges, use that as the color channel in a texture and apply the texture with Cube mapping.

[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 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 Jones]

Probably the Metaball’s Editor vs Renderer Subdivision in combination with the sphere size and the Hull value (not to mention Exponential Falloff)… unless something else is going on.

[Brian Jones]

Is this the sort of thing?