By Chuck Berry (Chuckberry) (207.237.127.251) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 04:36 pm:

Hi all,

I just made a new starfield (thanks guys from the other thread) and I did a test render with the camera just moving forward in the field to see how it looked.

To my horror, the background (an inverted sphere with basically some fractal noise done to look like stars) flickers or jitters when it's played back.

I saw a bit when using point polys as your background to try using particle blur to clean it up, but it didn't help. Most likely because that's a point poly fix which I am not using now ... ;) I've tried rendering with light Antialiasing and Enhanced AA on & off. No luck.

Suggestions or even fixes would be most welcome.

Regards,
CB

By Bill Carne (Jerbil) (137.186.247.238) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 06:50 pm:

I'm not real familiar with your method for doing the stars so it's hard to say. Sorry. But particle blur fixes that problem if your using single point polys. Maybe re-do the star field that way? Hopefully someone else can help out a bit more. I'm just guessing too but a motion blur might help you out there. If that's a kind of effect you're willing to tolerate in your scene

By Chuck Berry (Chuckberry) (207.237.127.251) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 08:17 pm:

I got away from the single polys because I needed to reflect the starfield on a surface in the animation....can't do that with single polys. So I switched to the fractal stars.

I tried baking the surface, but it A) it looks like hell and B) there's no lighting in the scene really so tyring to light it all up is messing up the effect.

By Howard Margolius (Howardm) (63.227.115.81) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 08:52 pm:

Its probably just your Star settings, did you use veins? you can get really good stars just tweak veins in wierd ways, use negative #s, etc!

whatever you used, you probably just need to tweak the size a little more...

By Chuck Berry (Chuckberry) (207.237.127.251) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 10:13 pm:

Well, I tried veins and got something....eh useable.

It's not using any negatives, it's:
Coverage .36
Leverage 0
Ledge Width 0

Scale of 1m all around.

I did a test render and each frame seems to have a different pattern. As in, the texture seems to be moving, but there's no movement programmed. This was done with low enhance AA and particle blur on. The target object is a sphere 5Mm in diameter. The texture jumps all over the place each frame.

I'll admit, I'm not a genius with all the different sizing things. I see how the scale effects the output based on the scale of the object, but I'm not really a numbers guy.

Using the small scale was the only way to get the tiny dots. If I autosized it gave me, well...veins. No wild numbers made any difference. It only gave big splotches.

I did a nice multi-layered texture using a few turbulances, a dots and something else so I could have a little color in there too, not just white stars. That one suffers the same flicker.

By Howard Margolius (Howardm) (63.227.115.81) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 11:58 pm:

sorry, but its crust and FBM!
heres a good starting point, load this preset into your TextureEnvironment...

http://www.3dink.com/stars.zip

By Chuck Berry (Chuckberry) (207.237.127.251) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 09:20 am:

Thanks very much Howard.

Um...how do I load that? It looks like a preset file to me so I unzipped it into the space presets. I can see it in the library, but when I try to load it, LW says it contains no surface data.

Sorry for being a pain, you're being so helpful!

CB

By Chuck Berry (Chuckberry) (207.237.127.251) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 01:53 pm:

Think I got it.

It's all in the texture scale. Above I mentioned I'm using a 5Mm sphere and a 1m texture size. Bad idea. I've moved up to a 100km size and have a stable starfield now.

Oh, and in the FBM, it's a negative contrast that gets you down to the small dots. :D

Thanks again for your help. Once I get this together it should be sweet.