Hello all
I've been experimenting with Saslite to do grass and hair recently and
while still images look good, I get bad flickering / noise whenever I
try rendering animation that involves the Sasquatch.

I've searched around on the web and not come across any satisfactory
solutions to this problem, but I think I've worked out for myself how
to eliminate flicker and get good looking, moving fur.

Basically, I rendered out frames at double the resolution that I want
the final animation to be, with anti aliasing switched on. Then I did a
batch operation in Photoshop which applies a Gaussian blur of 1 pixel,
then reduces the image size by 50% , (ie the desired final resolution)
on each frame. The results are really quite amazing and finally, I've
got flicker free moving fur.

Hope this helps anyone else who's come across the same problem....For
me it's made the difference between using Saslite and not.

Cheers

Nicko

"Wondrous is our great blue ship that sails around the mighty sun, and
joy to everyone that rides along"

Not sure if this will help you any, but I do know that with Sas Full 
version
you need to turn off Ray Trace Optimization in the Render Panel.
There is a glitch with this.
It may also do the same thing with Sas Lite, I'm not sure.
Well, actually, I just looked up one of my old Sas Lite tutorials and 
checked my settings,
and yes, I had that option turned off and I got no flikers with the 
resulting animation, which is here.
Not exactly the greatest animation, but it wasn't meant to concentrate 
on this issue.
http://www.md-arts.com/SasLite_SplotchyGrass_Growing_640..avi

But, as you can see, it doesn't have any flinking, none the less :)

Give this a shot and do a small render test, just to check and see.
The camera in my scene doesn't move, so that may make a difference, 
though it
all works correctly following these rules for Sas Full in a full on 
camera moving animation.

And yes, the method you tried also works fine too if nothing else will :)
But, if you can avoid those extra steps, then why not, right? :)

Good luck with this..................md :)
P.S. You can find the SasLite tutorial at my site with the link at the 
bottom of this page.


Nicko wrote:

>Hello all
>I've been experimenting with Saslite to do grass and hair recently and
>while still images look good, I get bad flickering / noise whenever I
>try rendering animation that involves the Sasquatch.
>
>I've searched around on the web and not come across any satisfactory
>solutions to this problem, but I think I've worked out for myself how
>to eliminate flicker and get good looking, moving fur.
>
>Basically, I rendered out frames at double the resolution that I want
>the final animation to be, with anti aliasing switched on. Then I did a
>batch operation in Photoshop which applies a Gaussian blur of 1 pixel,
>then reduces the image size by 50% , (ie the desired final resolution)
>on each frame. The results are really quite amazing and finally, I've
>got flicker free moving fur.
>
>Hope this helps anyone else who's come across the same problem....For
>me it's made the difference between using Saslite and not.
>
>Cheers
>
>Nicko
>
>"Wondrous is our great blue ship that sails around the mighty sun, and
>joy to everyone that rides along"
>
>  
>


-- 
-- 
Check out my Tutorials:

MD arts
Mark Dunakin
md@md-arts.com
http://www.md-arts.com 

Hey Mark
Yep, I've tried *everything else* to try and get rid of that damned
flicker, including turning off raytracing optimisation!

Since posting yesterday though, I've realised that I can actually miss
out the Gaussian Blur step and just downsize the image to achieve the
same results.

Maybe it's something to do with moving cameras but I've been wrestling
with this one for a little while now, and I'm just relieved to have got
a solution, even if it means longer rendering times. The noise and
flicker I was getting were just making Saslite not worth it, which was
a shame since I'm working on something that is really improved with
Grass & Fur.

Cheers

Nicko

"Wondrous is our great blue ship that sails around the mighty sun, and
joy to everyone that rides along"

Nicko wrote:

>Maybe it's something to do with moving cameras but I've been wrestling
>with this one for a little while now, and I'm just relieved to have got
>a solution, even if it means longer rendering times. The noise and
>flicker I was getting were just making Saslite not worth it, which was
>a shame since I'm working on something that is really improved with
>Grass & Fur.
>
>Cheers
>
>Nicko
>  
>
Yeah, I meant to tell you, that you didn't need to do anything to the 
post images, but just shrink
them down, as that will automatically do a sort of antialias on them 
when it resizes them down.
That's also a technique people use with other flickerings in other 
programs that
do these sorts of things some times, like in Vue with Procedurals.
And yeah, it generally always has to do with the camera being moved.
Though you can also add some motion blur, but that can take some time
to figure out the right settings and ALSO it adds a lot more time to 
your renders.
The Batch Rendering process of just shrinking the frames down in PS 
should be a breeze though.
But, I guess, maybe doing this method also means you will have to render 
longer
render time anyway, for making the larger sized frames, right?

Anyway, good luck and let us know if and when you do figure something 
out for this?
I have too many other things going on right now to spend any 
experimental time
on this subject for you, though if you sent me the scene, I might be able
to see if I could find something you might be missing somewhere?
I've rendered plenty of Sas animation s and animations with camera 
movements.
Mine all looked good.
For taht matter, maybe double check the sample animated scenes that
are provided to see if you can find anything that you might have missed?
I mean, if there are any of these sample scenes for SasLite? :)

Good luck.................md :)


-- 
-- 
Check out my Tutorials:

MD arts
Mark Dunakin
md@md-arts.com
http://www.md-arts.com