Tiny Path-Traced Anti-Aliasing issues

I think that with Path tracing, the most important feature is in the movie capture tab:
Path Trace samples per pixel

fire 1 - 3 samples:

fire 2 - 10 samples:

fire 3 - 30 samples ( average render time per frame 5 sec. ):

fire 4 - 60 samples ( average render time per frame 10 sec. ):

But 4 crashed machinima after rendering 129 frames, so I guess it´s not a good idea to crank this setting that high… ?

I continued by tweaking the Anti-Aliasing:

fire 5 - 30 samples ( average render time per frame 5 sec. )

Path Trace samples per pixel 30
Render settings / Path tracing / anti-aliasing sample pattern: gaussian
Render settings / Path tracing / anti-aliasing radius: 1
Alredy this little thing made the render to look as good as fire 4, but with 50% faster render time

fire 6 - 15 samples ( average render time per frame 2.5 sec. )
Path Trace samples per pixel 15
Render settings / Path tracing / anti-aliasing sample pattern: gaussian
Render settings / Path tracing / anti-aliasing radius: 1
BUt again machinima crashed frame 186 :(

fire 7
Render settings / Path tracing / anti-aliasing sample pattern: uniform
no good - a lot of aa problems.

fire 8
Path Trace samples per pixel 10 ( average render time per frame 1.7 sec. )
Render settings / Path tracing / anti-aliasing sample pattern: gaussian
Render settings / Path tracing / anti-aliasing radius: 1

Ok I stick to this for now. I hope I do not get render crashes.

fire 9 ( average render time per frame 1.7 sec. )

Path Trace samples per pixel 10
Motion blur ON
motion blur settings
subframes per frame 5

fire 9 half-shot ( average render time per frame 2.5 sec. )

So people, tell me what to do to make that tiny aa flickering away?
Or do I just wait until we get the possible update to Iray in Machinima?

Next I bring in the fire! But that´s a different topic :)

@pekka.varis Thanks for all the example videos! Am I correct that your issue here is the shaking or vibrating of the mesh that is really noticeable in the character’s hands and arms?

Pekka_Fire_Shake

If yes, I don’t think the issue is with the renderer’s anti-aliasing settings. It looks more to me like the mesh itself is animating inconsistently from frame to frame. I’ll ping some other people here and see if we’ve encountered this issue before.

Thanks for all the videos,

Technically there shouldn’t be any crashes at higher sample count.
Would you be able to provide a screenshot of the movie capture window along with your GPU type and driver version?

For sharp specular reflections, higher sample is needed. Depends on the scene complexity, you might find yourself increasing the sample count to 128, 256, or 512.

Sorry, no. I am talking about Anti-Aliasing issues, visible at her coat´s zipper for example. I also figure out that this shaking hand is part of the “chaos-magic” styled motion :P

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Here are my new Path-Traced test! No crashes :)
Let´s look at the girls topper zipper where is some anti aliasing flickering gong on…
Looks like that those specular reflections are a bit of a problem to Path-Tracer.
Rendering with high resolution like 3000 pix wide and then downscaling did not helped at all
( in real-time it helps a bit with AA issues )

Path Trace samples per pixel 128
Motion blur OFF
Render settings / Path tracing / anti-aliasing sample pattern: gaussian
render time: 25 sec /frm


Path Trace samples per pixel 128
Motion blur OFF
Render settings / Path tracing / anti-aliasing sample pattern: triangle
render time: 10 sec /frm
same quality as above, so when raising Path Trace samples per pixel to high, let say above 30
then is better to leave the default value “triangle” ON

3rd try
Path tracing / Max bounces Specular/transmission 12 ( default 6 )
did not made the AA flickering any better…

Any comments anyone? Any more sliders to play with?

Just to compare - here is render made with the Real-Time settings that antoni.caimari.caldes just shared:

render time: 0.15 sec /frm
I added Bloom.

It’s looking better, I’m curious to see this with 512 samples. The Specular and Transmission bounces won’t affect AA quality.
Are these examples rendered with denoiser?

Yes they are rendered with denoiser, default setting 0. Everything is defaut. Now in 256 samples the AA issues are gone but then again rendering time is 2 min / frm with my single RTX 2070 super.

But now the fire looks a bit “blocky” see?
Should I raise the flowEmitterSphere / numSubSteps to 2 ? Now it´s 1.

Another scene, Path traced with 40 samples :

Flickers way too much…

Samples 128, not quite enough yet - look at the floor on her left :P

Story continues here: