Rendering flickering issues

[Anonymous]

Ello peeps, I have another problem but this time its in regards to my mental ray render. I'm relatively new to 3Ds Max, and I need help with some flickering issues within my render. Im not sure how to stop the light flickering problem, can somebody please help me out? Thank you. Heres a low quality render sample to give u an idea of whats going on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otB59MWHkUM

[Anonymous]

We'll need a little more info about your scene.

Which Sampling Method are you using in mental ray, Classic / Raytraced or Unified / Raytraced?

(Render Setup, Renderer tab)

If in Classic mode try setting your min saples to 1 and your max to 16, If in Unified mode (the 2014 default) crank your quality up to 1.0 and re-render.

How many samples are you using for the reflection in your materials? Also, what kind of material are you using?

If it's an arch & design leave the samples at 8 when using Unified sampling, for Classic mode increase them to something like 24 or 32.

[Anonymous]

Hey thanks for the reply, currently I'm running 2014 and my settings are according, sampling mode set to unified / raytraced shadows. My render settings at the moment are set to fg precision low, initial fg point density to .4, rays per fg point 150, interpolate over num. fg points 30, diffuse bounces 3, max ref and ref are 5, image precision quality/noise 1.0, glossy reflections and refrections 1.0, shadow quality 2X. As far as samples In my reflections I got glossy samples set to 8, maybe that could be the problem perhaps?  Also Im using the arch & design shaders with the brushed metal template.  Could it be my glossy samples are set too low on my arch and design shaders?

[Anonymous]

You're better off changing the Quality value in the Unified / Raytraced menu. But with the default 8 samples set in your a&d materials and a quality setting of 1.0 - 2.0 you should get quite flickerfree good-looking glossy metal.

Upping the samples in your materials can have an adverse effect on rendertimes, without the quality improving all that much when using Unified Sampling.

[Anonymous]

Thank you soooo much midge!!! Your recent method helped out Tremendously, however its still a tiny bit speckly, but its 100 times better than before. I had the filter to mitchell with the quality at 1.0, I increased the unified/raytraced quality to 2.0 and it made the animation a lot more crisp. I tell you, this thing was driving me nutz, I was following tutorials on fg maps and all sorts of other ones and nothing was helping. Just that little sample per pixel made all the difference in the world. Thnx again, my job was starting to get pissed at me lol. Is there any other way to increase the quality even further?

[Anonymous]

I'm glad you got it sorted out. Easiest way to increase the quality even further would just to increase the value in the quality slider even more. Though rendertimes would start getting over the top if increased too much. That's what testing is for. 🙂

Also, when rendering animations using a Gauss filter generally gives the best results. The Mitchell filter you're using sharpens things up and will exaggerate things like flicker and grain. Gauss smoothes and thus over several frames of animation can help a little more with the flickering.

Mitchel is generally used for stills to bring out the extra detail, whereas Gauss for animations beacuse of it's smoothing property.

[Anonymous]

Ahh I didnt know that, good to know. I was taught use mitchell in school, well that was for maya class (should be similiar i would suppose). Well from here on out Gauss it is.  thnx a ton again!

[Anonymous]

Glad to help, be sure to keep your Gauss filter size around 2.0, otherwise the smoothing / blurring will get quite extreme.

Also, Gauss is the slowest rendering filter in the list (for mental ray) so expect slightly longer rendertimes.

[Anonymous]

Hi, can you pleqse explain to me how you achieved that please, because i have the same problem ?