Cineversity

Hi I’m having real issues with shadows in an animation. There’s a short 1 second render which demonstrates what I’m seeing. I’ve tried to increase the physical sampler setting (even using the default ‘high’ setting, dropped using GI, increased the AO subdivision value, swapped from soft shadows to area shadows and now I’m trying the test again with AO turned off. Has anyone come across this?

I’ve spent days trying to narrow down the issue and I need to find a solution today as tomorrow I need to start off the final Team Render if i’m going to hit deadline!

Many thanks in advance 8o)

Hi Yoscoob,

If you have tried several shadow options (Soft and Area), as well switched off GI, and AO, then this would exclude these as source of the problem.

The next option would be with a plain ray tracer shadow, AO off, and crop the render area to the problem, without using Team Render at all. Keep the crop area pretty small. Anti Alias of course to animation and at least 4x4 for max. Standard Render for the first test of that one second, then Physical. This would be what I would do first. If it appears on one machine as well, it is not the Team Render. If it is the Team Render, try to keep the “Render-CPUs” as similar as possible for the next test. No wild mix, to exclude that option.

Without the scene file it is difficult to say anything more.

The question would be, if the objects are fine, no double polygons, all normals are fine etc. No materials that might switch, a hard (no gradient) fresnel effect for example.

All the best

Sassi

Hi Dr Sassi - thanks fro the response. I’m still testing by a process of elimination with and without: AO/GI (Irradiance Cache as QMC taking too long to be any use)/Physical render/Standard render engine even isolating and removing all lights and it still does it! I’m now actually just trying a test having copied everything into a clean scene to see if i messed up days ago and lost track! Next step is turn shadows from Area to Raytrace then shadow map. if not I’ll be tweaking as you suggest there. I haven’t tried without team render yet… it’ll take ages to see the results and frankly if team render is the issue I’m in real trouble! I’ll run that over night presuming I get nowhere today.

The strange thing is that the results are not random, The scene is static, the lights are static with only objects moving on and then off screen but it’s exactly the same frames causing the issue every time…. frames 87 and 88 are fine, frame 89 has inconsistent shadowing in the same large area every time! then 99 is fine.

I’ll let you know!

PS just tried with no shadows set for any lights and it still does it, tried team render using my x3 Mac farm but not my work satiation, same result and now just tried a scaled back version on just my workstation and same result again. The good new is I can still use team render and Physical render… once i work out what the hell I’e dome to my scene!

Thanks again 8o)

Thanks for the new details, Yoscoob. With no shadows, and with no GI/AO, something in the model must be the problem. Again, not having the scene here, makes it hard to tell. Perhaps check with the support! I assume frame 98 is not rendered always from the same CPU? But if so: Exclude each of the three, one by one, if you think it is the Team Render.

If objects do not move, only appear and disappear (do I go this right from the “on and then off screen”?), then some ideas should be considered/tested.

Bake the scene for each object appearance and render those, separately, edit the on and off like a movie later.

If the object do not move, bake only the area where they produce a shadow, and switch the texture when the objects appear accordingly.

If backing might not idea, camera mapping might. To get the shadow for the object, use the Compositing-Tag, and render from the animated camera at one frame. Copy the camera for that frame without animation, and use it as Projection Camera. (I have no idea about your scene, so this might—might not work that nice)

Normally shadow maps are not the way to go. If GI is used, AO is already included. To add AO on top of that increase the contrast in some areas, but AO is most likely not natural, compared to AO. A proper color grading is the better way, form my point of view, and faster.

Cheers

Sassi

OK, good advice there (especially regarding using AO and GI together) - I’ll certainly remember that for all future projects 80). I’ve not used GI since Physical Render was introduced but now there’s no tickbox for “indirect illumination” I’ve lost a great deal of my workflow presets…. A solution to that is probably best for another thread tho!

the search goes on!

Cheers 8o)

If you get nothing, and the scene can’t be shared here, please open a support ticket. If you are that close to a deadline, suggestions that are not based on the scene directly will take too much of your time.

Yes, that might be another thread, but perhaps worth to request a tutorial about. How to get the same in R15 from that previous options, for example.

Good luck

Sassi