Rendered Animation Quality

I have an assembly that I am trying to get a good quality rendered animation of using SW Animator and PhotoWorks. The quality of what I've gotten so far just looks bad.

I created the animation first. Then I set all the materials and the scene and rendered a couple shots here and there using the PW render to make sure I liked the images. They were great. So I created the AVI using the default Windows compressor, I think, with the quality set all the way up to 100% and the highest resolution possible (800x600). It took the 65 second animation with 15 fps about 10 hours to render but I wanted the best AVI output I could get since I'll take that file and run it through a video editing program to finish the movie and compress it at that point.

What I've ended up with were blotchy and foggy images, In the areas where the light reflects off of a surface and you get a light spot with a gradient color change as you go away from the reflection appear to be striped in the animation. I should say that this assembly has a translucent outer case to add to the problem and that appears to fog up at times in the animation. So what can I do?

As I said, when I render individual images in PW they look great. So my thought is that the video compression is degrading the quality. I've set that to 100% quality so there should be no compression, right? Please let me know if there is a setting I'm missing somewhere.

Thanks for your help. dp

Reply to
dpodz
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can you post some frames showing what you mean? what sort of lighting are you using?

Reply to
neilscad

Dan:

I have seen this before in other animation apps. If you are using any global illumination settings (photons, final gather, etc.) you will need to increase the quality of the GI solution to improve the frame- to-frame consistency. Another suggestion is to render out the AVI with compression set to None if possible. That leaves you a huge file but it takes any compression artifacts out of the discussion.

Joel

Reply to
jhowe

That give me a result closer to what I'm looking for. I guess even though I specified 100% quality, the compression module still compressed the frames. That is not the same as No Compression. Thanks for your help.

Dan

Reply to
dpodz

I don't know if you can do this, but I always render out my animations as PNG still images. Then I can import a sequence of PNGs into a video editor and it treats it like video footage. You get the non-lossy PNG along with any transparency from the scene as well, and your render doesn't have to start from the beginning again if you experience a crash half-way through.

Joel

3D Animator
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Reply to
jhowe

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