Minumum AA for animation?

[crazy homeless guy]

I have a question about what AA setting people are using to render animations with MR and Max? ...I don't mind a little dancing in the AA because I am on a deadline, but I have really been struggling to find a balance between speed and quality.

I was using 1 to 16, with a box filter. I knew this would leave me with dancing, but it was a setting that I thought I could live with. Well, what rendered last night with those settings looked horrid to say the least. I am getting about 18 minutes a frame right now, so I am nervous that simply upping my AA is going to make me miss my deadline.

I did find this quote in another thread... Not sure how much it applies to what I am doing.
"Turn off texture anti-aliasing and use systematic geometry anti-aliasing with only a few rays per pixel (typically 4 rays/pixel). This will be enough for the render engine to pick up areas where there is a lot of detail. By setting the max number of rays and the quality threshold to very high values, you will instruct the render engine to spend most of its time on these areas."

Attached is a reference of what I am working on.... It is not the full entourage, and I need to correct the camera work, but it is enough to give an idea. The perf metal material I will correct at the material level by making the holes bigger, but I need to get my settings to a point that the mullions are not dancing around. I can live with the trees dancing for now.

http://www.phase22.com/misc/germanMR/Ext1.wmv <--33megs

Thanks for any advice,
Travis

[banned]

try this

normal AA:
min =1
max =16 or 64
Spatial Contrast = 0,07 0,07 0,07 0.07
Filter = Triangle or Gaus

or very Fast = Fast Rasterize
Sample per Pixel : 16
Shapes per Pixel = 0.5 - 1

[crazy homeless guy]

Thanks, I will try that. I can't afford to render to 64 right now because of time. I also think I had lock samples and jitter unchecked. Maybe that was part of the problem?

I was using 0.05 for spatial contrast.

[crazy homeless guy]

...forgot to mention. I am using a ton of proxies, so Fast Rasterizer is not an option. To use Fast Rasterizer, you need to enable scanline. Scanline is not flushable, so it tries to load all of the proxies into memory at once, which defeats the purpose of using proxies.

[michael.reuter]

so it tries to load all of the proxies into memory at once, which defeats the purpose of using proxies.

Have you tried this out with fast rasterizer? Because technically fast rasterizer has nothing to do wit the scanline algorithms. The two renderalgorithms don't share a single line of code.

The presentation in the Max interface can be misleading in this point. In fact you have 3 independant options to chose for primary rays: scanliner, fast rasterizer or raytraced. These options should be represented more like 3 radiobuttons. Fast rasterizer is not a "subfunction" of the scanliner, thus the scanliner is completely replaced by the fast rasterizer and you shouldn't have to have to check the scanliner option to be able to chose fast rasterizer.

As a conclusion it is very well possible, that fast rasterizer will work fine with proxys (I've not tried that by myself though).

Thanks go to MasterZap for explaining this at the EUE in Utrecht ...

regards Michael

[crazy homeless guy]

so it tries to load all of the proxies into memory at once, which defeats the purpose of using proxies.

Have you tried this out with fast rasterizer? Because technically fast rasterizer has nothing to do wit the scanline algorithms. The two renderalgorithms don't share a single line of code.

The presentation in the Max interface can be misleading in this point. In fact you have 3 independant options to chose for primary rays: scanliner, fast rasterizer or raytraced. These options should be represented more like 3 radiobuttons. Fast rasterizer is not a "subfunction" of the scanliner, thus the scanliner is completely replaced by the fast rasterizer and you shouldn't have to have to check the scanliner option to be able to chose fast rasterizer.

As a conclusion it is very well possible, that fast rasterizer will work fine with proxys (I've not tried that by myself though).

Thanks go to MasterZap for explaining this at the EUE in Utrecht ...

regards Michael

Are you saying that if I turn on Scanline, then turn on Use Fast Rasterizer, it disables the Scanline, even though Scanline appears as though it is still enabled? ...it would be important that is disables Scanline, because Scanline is nonflushable, and I will quickly run out of memery.

[michael.reuter]

Yes, turning on Fast Rasterizer does in fact disable the Scanliner, even though Scanline appears as though it is still enabled.
At least as far as you can trust MasterZaps explanations. I would strongly suggest that

regards Michael

[crazy homeless guy]

Good to know. I am already half way through rendering the tree pass at 4:16. It is going to dance, but I don't want to turn around now because I need to start a building pass as soon as the tree pass is done. I will run a test on it with the building pass, but I do get a bit nervous experimenting so close to my deadline.

[crazy homeless guy]

I tired the scene with Fast Rasterizer and MR ran out of memory. I will need to investigate further, but this would be a symptom of non flushable proxy objects, which is the same problem with Scanline and BSP.