Improve quality of rendering using MEL

[howard.cohl]

This is a rendering of coordinate surfaces in flat-ring cyclide coordinates, a rotationally invariant coordinate system which solves the three-dimensional Laplace equation by R-separation of variables. I generated this image using Maya/MEL with the render command. It is really great but if you zoom in you will see speckles, especially near the equatorial plane. Also there seem to be slight errors due to the lighting in the upper right hand corner of the outermost blue surface. Anyone know how I can tweak the command to improve the quality of rendering?

[howard.cohl]

FYI, the command I am using is:

Render -renderer sw -ifg 1 -cam camera1 -x 960 -y 720 -ard 1.3333333 -of png -rd $IMGDIR -im filename -n 0 $SCENEDIR/mr_scene.mb

[mcw0]

With speckles, verify with a double resolution render that the size of the speckles are the same as the original resolution.  If the size of the speckles don't change with resolution, then the old school trick of up-resing and down-resing.  Basically, render 4X your final desired resolution.  And then resize in Nuke or After Effects or even PhotoShop to reduce the speckles to nothing.

[howard.cohl]

Thank you mcw0  for this!! I'm sure this is going to be really helpful.

However, since I am a newbie to Maya. Could you be a little more Maya/MEL specific? When you refer to increasing the resolution, do you mean simply upping the -x and -y values called to Render or are you referring to changing some other parameters in the render call or elsewhere in my pipeline?

[mcw0]

You got it...increasing the -x and -y values.  Good luck

[howard.cohl · Accepted solution]

Wow. That is nice. Seems to have worked well, but I went 8x to fully get rid of the speckles.