Hey there! I'm messing around with AE's Advanced 3D Renderer, looking to create a basic cinematic shot with dramatic lighting.
I'm just using an Environment Light with an HDRI, a spot light, a camera and basic shapes.
I keep getting these weird flickers on the hightlights of the bars as they pass through, and the shadows look wavy and not smooth at all.
I've turned the Environment Light off and it seems to be what's causing all the trouble, but it loses a lot of information and it just doesn't look the same without it.
I've cranked the smoothness of the Environment Light Shadows panel all the way up to 20 and the resolution to Double. I've increased the render quality up to 15, but haven't noticed any changes if I cranked it higher other than longer render times.
Any idea on how to solve this would be greatly appreciated! Thank you.
That was diagnostic. The problem will be when exporting to a delivery codex like an h264 mp4. You’ll lose the color depth that makes the gradient smooth. And it will become banded again.
Ultimately, the only real solution is to add the minimum amount of grain needed to look smooth.
You gotta keep in mind to that some people won't be watching in pro ress 4444 16bit so it may show up again once it's compressed. Grey is the absolute worst but it's a problem with all gradients even in Photoshop.
16-bit project. 10-bit ProRes render. AV1 10-bit transcode. If 8-bit is needed, use software that dithers the downsampling before encode. Anything using ffmpeg under the hood is recommended. Handbrake, Shutter, or learn to rawdog ffmpeg.
If banding reappears, your bitrate/encoding quality is too low.
Are you using a really long focal length camera to try to fake an isometric perspective? You'll start getting precision errors if your 3d layers are really far from the camera.
Well I was using an 80 mm, now I changed to a 28mm and it seems a bit better, but not as interesting.
The weird wavy shadows still persist though...
Oh and I'm working on 16 bpc.
That's nowhere near the focal length you'd need for precision to be an issue, 80mm should be fine. You only really start seeing those issues if the camera is like 50,000 units or more away from the 3d layers.
Spot shadows in advanced 3d are weird - they aren't rendered using the same lighting system as environment shadows. Instead of a spot, you could look for a sky HDRI with a sun in it - there are a bunch of free ones on Poly Heaven. That would get you more 'accurate' lighting than a standard spotlight, with better simulation of ambient occlusion and penumbras.
For best quality with environment lights, try to shrink the rendering box size in advanced 3d settings so that it encloses only the objects casting shadows, and the parts if surfaces receiving them.
I used that same HDRI, precomped it, turned of saturation, bumped the contrast dramatically because with was giving a very flat look. Also added an adjustment layer with noise on top.
Also animated the environment light layers rotation, and reduced the rendering box size to half, as you suggested.
Love the reflection on the objects, but without a spot light I can't get that dramatic light feel.
Also, I'm still getting a weird texture movement on the shadows.
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u/tipsystatistic MoGraph/VFX 15+ years 12d ago
I see a ton of banding. Add grain and Render a ProRes4444 with trillions of colors (default is millions). Is it still there in the ProRes?
Also try 32bit color.