Iray performance tips to reduce fireflies

fireFlies_in_IRay

Picked up a few tips on the  Nvidia IRay forum

There is an Iray Performance tips PDF that suggests a couple of tricks to reduces fireflies.

Adjust texture resolutions to the scene requirements.

  • Textures compete with geometry for the GPU memory. The higher the resolution of
    textures, the less the memory available for geometry, and vice-versa.
  • High frequency textures at high resolutions may become a source of further noise
    and require more time to converge.

The total reflectivity (reflectivy * reflection_color) should be capped to 0.7. It’s OK to use a white reflection color with a reflectivity of 0.7. It’s also OK to use a reflectivity of 1.0 and a reflection color of 0.7.

At blog.irayrender.com/ I found a maxscript filter firefly-removal-max-script that may help.

I’m tempted to design a custom filter in fusion to deal with fireflies in animated sequences. But unless things improve with iray I’m likely to move over to VrayRT for GPU rendering

Amazing shorts: the approximate present

At the #oxfordindies lunch today we discussed how good low polygon design draws upon old artistic traditions of abstraction and simplification.
This is a beautiful example by Filippo Baracani

#oxfordindie richard whitelockIn development of his game Into This Wylde Abyss has contributed to a few articles on low poly art

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/poly-generational/
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/poly-generational-2/
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/low-poly-3/

Maxscript alembic

While alembic support has finally been added to 3dsMax 2015 the maxscript documentation has yet to appear. With a bit of digging around this is what I have found.

Alembic Objects

selecting an object and using showproperties $ show these properties

 .source : filename
.object : string

Importing alembic files

files are imported using the ImportFile command. You can show a list of supported plugins by using:

 print importerPlugin.classes 

This will list Alembic_Import as a plugin class

 showInterfaces Alembic_Import 

Will show the following

Interface: AlembicImport
Properties:
.ZUp : boolean : Read|Write
.ImportToRoot : boolean : Read|Write
Methods:
Actions:

Interestingly while ImportToRoot IS included in the standard max dialog ZUP is not, and alas I cannot find a way to switch the time range options using max script.

Exporting alembic files

the exporter can be inspected in a similar way

 print exporterPlugin.classes 

This will list ABCEXP as a plugin class

 showInterfaces ABCEXP 

Will show the following

 

  Interface: AlembicExport
   Properties:
    .CoordinateSystem : enum : Read|Write
       CoordinateSystem enums: {#Max|#Maya}
    .ArchiveType : enum : Read|Write
       ArchiveType enums: {#HDF5|#Ogawa}
   Methods:
   Actions:

Again its not obvious how to access the time cache range shown in the Alembic Export dialog

Amazing shorts: Windmills

Check out this awesome short. A beautiful blend of CG and traditional animation. Graduation film from France’s Georges Méliès school, directed by Guillaume Bergère, Guillaume Coudert, Maria Glinyanova, Bruno Guerra and Charlotte Jammet.

It is a dead, lightless world, where a little girl, despite her father’s renunciation and despair facing the death of his wife, maintains their dream of building a machine powered by magic winds to fly and reach the sun.

So for those who didn’t understand the French:
Girl: “There’s enough wind for us to go!”
Dad: “I’m staying… with your mother. Leave without us. Go.”
Girl: “I don’t want to go without you!”

Check out wind-mills-le-film.blogspot.co.uk and their facebook page for more art and information.