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Anyone using Maxwell to make animated elements for compositing into film?

If you let the render get to too high a SL you have to add grain to make it fit into the film background.

Hi jfrancis,
I am using Maxwell for doing an animation.
What do you mean exactly by adding grain?
Which resolution are you using for your animation?
Are you using the render node/Network Manager to render all the frames?
thanks

jfrancis wrote:Anyone using Maxwell to make animated elements for compositing into film?

If you let the render get to too high a SL you have to add grain to make it fit into the film background.

What's important is the type of grain you want. Maxwell will give varying amounts of grain depending on lighting and materials. Adding grain in post will allow you better control. Also, Maxwell noise can flicker, so it's best to let the animation frames clear as much as possible.

So far my animated work has been daylight exteriors under physical sky, and it seems to clear up fairly well. I haven't tried something moody or with materials that are slow to clear.

I had a coating on one part of an object, but it seemed prone to graininess at a distance, so I dumped it.

I haven't tried it with Maxwell2 but setting the seed number the same for all frames made the grain not flicker in 1.7. (Example: -cpuid:1)

Did it make the grain static? I don't know if that would be good, either.

If I am correctly picturing what you mean by it, flickering is to some extent what makes grain seem diminished.

It averages in your mind to an ideal mean over time.

http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/ ... noise.html
http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/ ... k_fun.html

The grain won't be static in Maxwell, which yes would be pretty bad.

Mihai wrote:The grain won't be static in Maxwell, which yes would be pretty bad.

What does setting the seed do that stops the grain from flickering but makes it active?

And is that seed value accessible through the GUI or in the Maya plugin? I can't picture where that value would be set.

In Maya you can add "-idcpu:1" in the "Additional MXCL Flags" field in the render globals. This setting is used by Maya when starting Maxwell, but it's not saved in the MXS file, so it will only work if you render through Maya. If you export MXS files and render directly with Maxwell, you need to add that flag manually to its command line.