Voxel Shimmy

Krakatoa for 3ds Max
1

I’m getting some flicker\flutter in my voxel renderings. Any suggestions?

Fred
HM_Crash_Flickery.mov (385 KB)

2

What kind of light source, and how large is the shadow map size in it? (If shadow type is not ShadowMaps, default is 512).
It appears that playing with the shadow map size (e.g. increasing it to something like 2048 or even 4096) can affect the quality of shadows significantly.
Keep in mind that for Spotlights and Directlights (the types supported by Voxel mode), the shadow map is aligned to the visible cone, so if the cone is relatively large compared to the voxel size, voxels could fall between pixels of the shadow map quickly, causing flickering.

Chad Capeland also proposed a cool technique with cloning multiple versions of the light and rolling them around the Z axis and eventually varying their shadow map size to kill moire effects…

3

Couple tests to do…

  1. Render in point mode, not voxel, and see if the flickering is still there.

  2. Stop the PRT in the middle of the sequence, just hold one frame. Then do two renders, one where the camera is moving slowly to the side, and one where the light is moving slowly to the side. See if the flickering gets better or worse in each. If the camera or light is already position animated, then you can use that animation.

  • Chad
4

Thanks guys, Ill look into the shadow maps and increase the size.
BTW, why do the voxels get black in the middle when their density is set high?