How can i prevent micro-aliasing?

Eleven Heights

I tried increasing render quality to 5 and I'm still getting a lot of aliasing. Any suggestions?

magog_a4eb71ab

The skin looks atrocious in that render, especially on the legs. It almost looks like the pores of the skin are spaced out too far apart in some areas.

I would try reducing the bump map and/or normal map settings from 1.0 to 0.5 or lower if necessary. Some characters use a much higher(2 or even 5) default setting on the bump maps which can look terrible.

Another thing to try messing with is the lighting. If you're using Spotlights, don't use "Point"(iirc) and instead use something like "Disc" for the shape, which is found on the "Lights" tab after selecting the Spotlight. Anyway, I only see this causing a problem with geometry & shadows rather than textures. The only area I see a problem in your image is with the character's skin, which I think is being caused by settings that are too high for the bump maps/normal maps being used. I'm assuming this is an iray render.

barbult

There could also be an issue with setting the filter size too small in the Reder Settings. What values did you use in the Render Settings Filter section?

Eleven Heights

barbult said:

There could also be an issue with setting the filter size too small in the Reder Settings. What values did you use in the Render Settings Filter section?

I think I'm just using the default settings, see attached.

Eleven Heights

magog_a4eb71ab said:

The skin looks atrocious in that render, especially on the legs. It almost looks like the pores of the skin are spaced out too far apart in some areas.

I would try reducing the bump map and/or normal map settings from 1.0 to 0.5 or lower if necessary. Some characters use a much higher(2 or even 5) default setting on the bump maps which can look terrible.

Another thing to try messing with is the lighting. If you're using Spotlights, don't use "Point"(iirc) and instead use something like "Disc" for the shape, which is found on the "Lights" tab after selecting the Spotlight. Anyway, I only see this causing a problem with geometry & shadows rather than textures. The only area I see a problem in your image is with the character's skin, which I think is being caused by settings that are too high for the bump maps/normal maps being used. I'm assuming this is an iray render.

I think the spacing is caused by the texture stretching? Is there a way to prevent this? It is a daz 8 original texture.

barbult

Eleven Heights said:

barbult said:

There could also be an issue with setting the filter size too small in the Render Settings. What values did you use in the Render Settings Filter section?

I think I'm just using the default settings, see attached.

Those settings should result in a much smoother render than what you got. Something else is amiss.

barbult

Eleven Heights said:

magog_a4eb71ab said:

The skin looks atrocious in that render, especially on the legs. It almost looks like the pores of the skin are spaced out too far apart in some areas.

I would try reducing the bump map and/or normal map settings from 1.0 to 0.5 or lower if necessary. Some characters use a much higher(2 or even 5) default setting on the bump maps which can look terrible.

Another thing to try messing with is the lighting. If you're using Spotlights, don't use "Point"(iirc) and instead use something like "Disc" for the shape, which is found on the "Lights" tab after selecting the Spotlight. Anyway, I only see this causing a problem with geometry & shadows rather than textures. The only area I see a problem in your image is with the character's skin, which I think is being caused by settings that are too high for the bump maps/normal maps being used. I'm assuming this is an iray render.

I think the spacing is caused by the texture stretching? Is there a way to prevent this? It is a daz 8 original texture.

That character is not extremely morphed to cause texture stretching. What texture is it? Did you change settings in the Surfaces pane, like bump and normal map settings?

The hair also looks overly sharpened or something. Did you modify your rendered image to sharpen it with an image editor, like Photoshop or The Gimp?

MelissaGT

Honestly looks like goosebumps to me...and I think the skin looks pretty good. Looks like Twosret 8. 

Eleven Heights

barbult said:

Eleven Heights said:

magog_a4eb71ab said:

The skin looks atrocious in that render, especially on the legs. It almost looks like the pores of the skin are spaced out too far apart in some areas.

I would try reducing the bump map and/or normal map settings from 1.0 to 0.5 or lower if necessary. Some characters use a much higher(2 or even 5) default setting on the bump maps which can look terrible.

Another thing to try messing with is the lighting. If you're using Spotlights, don't use "Point"(iirc) and instead use something like "Disc" for the shape, which is found on the "Lights" tab after selecting the Spotlight. Anyway, I only see this causing a problem with geometry & shadows rather than textures. The only area I see a problem in your image is with the character's skin, which I think is being caused by settings that are too high for the bump maps/normal maps being used. I'm assuming this is an iray render.

I think the spacing is caused by the texture stretching? Is there a way to prevent this? It is a daz 8 original texture.

That character is not extremely morphed to cause texture stretching. What texture is it? Did you change settings in the Surfaces pane, like bump and normal map settings?

The hair also looks overly sharpened or something. Did you modify your rendered image to sharpen it with an image editor, like Photoshop or The Gimp?

 

The skin is the material settings from Ensley and texture from Twosret 8. I did sharpen but the skin was masked out pretty well

davidtriune

i dont know if you're lowkey flexing, but it's actually a pretty good render. check if you accidentally turned on the "spectral rendering" because that tends to makes things look harsher. But honestly I like this look a lot. when you zoom out you can't even really tell.

edit: are you talking about the background or foreground?

Fishtales

Looks like the background image has been resized, enlarged, and that is what is aliased, not the render. 

Richard Haseltine

Fishtales said:

Looks like the background image has been resized, enlarged, and that is what is aliased, not the render. 

Ah, pixellation - I was wondering what aliased meant and was looking in the wrong place on the image.

McGyver

Yeah, I never got to the legs, I saw the background image and thought the jaggies were in that... there's nothing you can do about that besides using a higher resolution background image.

gfdamron1

Wow, I would be extremely pleased with a result like this. I like skin that has believable textures, and maybe some "imperfections".

FSMCDesigns

I feel the sharpening is the biggest issue, you can see it in the hair, the background and on the finger joints. It also looks like it didn't render long enough which sharpening can bring out more.

richardandtracy

I have to confess that I think the image has rendered much better than on a number of promo images I have seen where the PA posted promo images covered in fireflies indicating insufficient rendering times (particularly at Rendo, with PA Second Circle as an example but not limited to either site or PA - just saw a SC example at Rendo this morning which is why it sprung to mind) . Honestly, that isn't good, and the OP's image is much better even when including the things that are causing them issues.

Eleven Heights

davidtriune said:

i dont know if you're lowkey flexing, but it's actually a pretty good render. check if you accidentally turned on the "spectral rendering" because that tends to makes things look harsher. But honestly I like this look a lot. when you zoom out you can't even really tell.

edit: are you talking about the background or foreground?

 

If you look at the hands zoomed in, it's very prevalent there.

Roman_K2

 I noticed the hands issue right away, but even that pales when you consider the overall quality of this excellent image.

The good news -- at least from me -- is that I've never seen anything like this (hands issue) before. Unless it's an aged figure like Circe or the Grandmother or something like that.

I suspect something in the postwork or post-render handling. Like "too much sharpening".

FSMCDesigns said:

It also looks like it didn't render long enough which sharpening can bring out more.

???

On my computers -- mostly Win7, Win10 -- the Iray rendering curve starts out *grainy*, not sharp. Then it gradually gets smoother and subtle shadows come out. It ends with sub-surface details, like blue veins if it's pale skin, becoming noticeable.

magog_a4eb71ab

Eleven Heights said:

magog_a4eb71ab said:

The skin looks atrocious in that render, especially on the legs. It almost looks like the pores of the skin are spaced out too far apart in some areas.

I would try reducing the bump map and/or normal map settings from 1.0 to 0.5 or lower if necessary. Some characters use a much higher(2 or even 5) default setting on the bump maps which can look terrible.

Another thing to try messing with is the lighting. If you're using Spotlights, don't use "Point"(iirc) and instead use something like "Disc" for the shape, which is found on the "Lights" tab after selecting the Spotlight. Anyway, I only see this causing a problem with geometry & shadows rather than textures. The only area I see a problem in your image is with the character's skin, which I think is being caused by settings that are too high for the bump maps/normal maps being used. I'm assuming this is an iray render.

I think the spacing is caused by the texture stretching? Is there a way to prevent this? It is a daz 8 original texture.

Afaik, not without editing it and pretty much redoing the whole texture set(base, bump, normal, specular). Its also an important piece of information to know up front if a render has postwork applied to it; otherwise we just go by what we see. Anyway, I still stand by my original opinion that the skin looks atrocious when viewing the rendered image in the original size. I'm looking at Twosret's promo pics right now and the pores' spacing on the skin & the overall color look fine to me. The best thing I can think of to describe the skin in some spots of your image would be something like the surface of rough dry wood, like as if it doesn't have depth(translucency setting and/or thin-walled is turned ON), and the bump appears to be way over-exaggerated in some spots(finger knuckles, upper arms, upper chest, legs). Depending on how much sharpening was added, a lot of it could be due to that alone.

Frinkky

In a quick cursory glance, other than the background texture being insuffiecient for the rendered resolution, I see nothing wrong except that the image has been overly sharpened. If you're going to sharpen in post, try running it through a denoiser first: https://github.com/DeclanRussell/IntelOIDenoiser

Roman_K2

I also do regional or highly selected sharpening. Never the entire image all at once... especially not if it's a bokeh (out of focus) background say. You don't want to sharpen those.

Roman_K2

I guess it had to happen sometime... now I'm doing a render that is progressing nicely -- G3F, G3F hair -- except there is some sort of artifact on the left wrist. I have no idea what it is. Looks like a bracelet or something, colliding with the wrist.

I have rendered this figure a lot in many different poses - 30, 40, maybe fifty times. Figure drawing practice sort of thing. Never had any anomalies or artifacts in a render before.

zombietaggerung

Looks like her hair is smoothing itself over her wrist. Either turn down the smoothing iterations or move her hand further away from her head.

magog_a4eb71ab

zombietaggerung said:

Looks like her hair is smoothing itself over her wrist. Either turn down the smoothing iterations or move her hand further away from her head.

I'm not familiar with the product myself as I've never tried using it, but wouldn't something like Mesh Grabber be able to at least allow you to manipulate that part of the hair and push it in?

zombietaggerung

magog_a4eb71ab said:

zombietaggerung said:

Looks like her hair is smoothing itself over her wrist. Either turn down the smoothing iterations or move her hand further away from her head.

I'm not familiar with the product myself as I've never tried using it, but wouldn't something like Mesh Grabber be able to at least allow you to manipulate that part of the hair and push it in?

I don't have that hair either, but it's a matter of mesh being too close together, and DS has a hard time figuring out how to correctly display it. It's the same reason dforce explosions happen. Mesh touches or clips into itself or other things and DS freaks out.

Roman_K2

I never thought of that (Mesh Grabber); thanks all.

Interesting about the "dforce explosions" and DS "freaking out"... everything has otherwise fairly stable except for a "Hexagon-and-Windows 10" problem. That is to say once things work. I have two machines (one Win7 32-bit and one Windows 10) where DS doesn't work at all. I just set those aside. (-:

I wonder which part of this scene is dforce? If "Galene Hair" for G3F is dforce that is news to me. I didn't know.

Roman_K2

Eleven Heights said:

I tried increasing render quality to 5 and I'm still getting a lot of aliasing. Any suggestions?

Slow computer? I can usually go with render quality 10, 25, maybe 30 on old Win7 machines with 4 GB of RAM say. Pixel width tops out at about 2,700 with such setups. 2,048 pixels wide is not a problem. This is for a single figure say, and not too many props and shaders.

With two figures I can still set up the scene without difficulty -- other than it usually takes several tries and test renders to work out the composition and shadows and minute changes to facial expression and fingers and toes. Once it is set up I'll delete the 2nd figure and render just the first. Then I'll delete the first and render only the 2nd figure. After that I will sandwich the two scenes together.

At night I dream of finding a mystical cave filled with glowing RAM chips and dazzling video cards. And the resident dragon is willing to make a deal.

zombietaggerung

Roman_K2 said:

I never thought of that (Mesh Grabber); thanks all.

Interesting about the "dforce explosions" and DS "freaking out"... everything has otherwise fairly stable except for a "Hexagon-and-Windows 10" problem. That is to say once things work. I have two machines (one Win7 32-bit and one Windows 10) where DS doesn't work at all. I just set those aside. (-:

I wonder which part of this scene is dforce? If "Galene Hair" for G3F is dforce that is news to me. I didn't know.

I didn't mean that this particular hair was dforce, I just used dforce explosions as an example. Since it's a G3 hair is not going to be dforce. However, it is mesh, and it's intersecting with her arm and so it looks like it's wrapping around. Turning down the smooting iterations on the hair or moving her arm away from her head usually fixes it. Hopefully this is more clear.