Light flickering issue

[Buggsy]

I'm sure I'm doing something to cause this problem.:s

I'm rendering my first HD internal architectural animation with GI photons and I'm getting this annoying and unpredictable flickering of what appears to be the area lights I have set up in the scene. I haven't done many animations so it may be something else.

EIAS on my iMac i7 and MacBook Pro have just spent the last day and a half rendering 5 seconds of animation as part of an overall 30 second presentation of one of my home designs. I feel I can't continue with any certainty as the flickering appears in random locations each time I render a scene.

I'm not talking about edge flickering due to lack of high enough sampling levels. I have found that a "Details" value of 1 in the "Global Illumination" settings will dumb this down enough for it not to be a problem. The problem appears to be one that I could fix in post editing by singling out the suspect frames and modifying their brightness to match the frames around them. A pretty sad way to fix it though.

The problem is happening in different locations each time. The intensity of the flickering, be it ever so slightly happens on frames 5, 7, 15, 16, 18, 24, 27 and then doesn't cause any problems for the remaining 94 frames.

Anyone else experience this problem and if so what is the solution/issue that needs to be addressed?

Michael

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Michael,

Please, upload your scene, Let me look..

Appears some setting problem.. :)

Thanks

Tom

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Michael,

I forgot to ask you a question!!

These "frames pattern error" can mean a simple problem, one of your slave folders have old builds of Camera, Renderama Slave, Shaders or Plug-ins.

Please, test it.

Thanks

Tom

[Buggsy]

Thanks Tomas for solving this light flicker issue.

It appears as though items that fall within the Area Lights "Block Distance" are at a risk of having conflicting issues particularly if they are being animated within this area. I had already excluded the sliding door frames from the Area Light so the block distance was reduced to 0.0 and the flickering issue has disappeared. Thanks Tomas for your time in resolving this.

A handy thing I've learnt here is to try and reduce as much of where Area Lights photons fall, or rather bounce to, in order to reduce rendering time and reduce photon map data size. When I started I had a photon map data size of 70MB for each of the 6 lights in the scene (slow when emitting photons and baking maps in camera) and it is now down to 9MB. The area lights photons were spilling outside onto the 100's of thousands of polygons on the OnyxTree models. As they are outside the GI bounce is enough lighting without wasting Area Light photons on them as well. It has a more efficient use of photons and GI now.

I will post a YouTube link once I have completed the animation.

Michael