I tried doing a Great Hall crowd seen. It took 11 layers of image maps. I started off with the professors on stage, then create image and made it a background, then remove pieces in background, and then generate new image for background. It took a while. Had originally hoped to do a short video, but the place setting increased the render time from 2 seconds to 40 per frame and I did want to see what it looked like with the place setting. As I added the layers, it did generate artifacts as you can see in the far corner of the hall but not sure what caused them and why only there. Anyone know what causes them and how to prevent them?

(click to enlarge)


Ray Higgins
4D Fans

Really nice likenesses of a lot of the characters there, as pertains to the movie versions of the Harry Potter series.

I'm trying to spot those artifacts you mentioned...guess I'm just too tired.




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The artifacts are in the corner of the room behind Hagrid. if you at the vertical edge of the tile on the wall or around the edges of faces there are white pixels. I'll try to post some of the intermedeiate steps to show it off better.

Ray Higgins
4D Fans

I notice it on your characters hair also - now when you say background, do you mean - background fixed image - or do you mean you used a 3D prop of a wall and used it as a background.

If you used the main fixed background for the image - not sure what that is ...

but if you used a prop - try using the "Alpha Threshold" check box, not sure if it will fix this problem to be honest - but usually when I have issues with images on props - this button often helps - especially with edges.

Another thing that comes to mind, based on the white in your characters hair - is the lighting - the way it's turning white is a reflection thing which you might be able to address with lighting angles in your render -

I'd also try playing around with the anti aliasing - another guess on that would be that with so many layers - some artifacts that weren't noticeable in the first image on your layer was getting progressively worse with each anti-aliasing treatment.

Kind of like with an mp3 - let's say you took the same approach of layers ...but with sound ....by the time you get to your final picture ....the 1st layer would have endured 10 generation losses from the constant reprocessing of adding each new layer and re-rerending.

Not sure if any of these are the answers - just giving some clues for a starting point as to what could possibly cause this.

Cheers and good luck!

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Actually I am using back ground images
Here is the first image in the series. here is one in the middle and one just before the final render

To me the weirdest part is that it is not the whole image. I might try playing with the anti aliasing. I also noticed that the background image was set to stretch and I might try tile (1 for 1) When ever I get around to trying it again I'll do an update.

Ray Higgins
4D Fans

What image format (jpg, png,...) do you use for your backgrounds? Is it multiple layers at the time with alphas?

I saw something similar in one of my scenes with a simulated video screen. I had different layers for different programs, I forgot to make one invisible while the other one was on. The result looked a little bit like your problem. If you have multiple layers at the time you may need to give them some distance.

Just throwing out some thoughts here...

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Thanks for the advise but in this instance I am doing multiple iteration of a single background image under 3D objects.  I beginning to think some effect like anti-aliasing is interacting with the background.  I might change the image format for a format that does not have any loss (PNG). when I get the time (evening or weekend if I do a video) to  try it again: I'll let you know if anything worked.

BTW for the person who made a comment about the characters, here is my wizards school (wink wink, nod, nod) group image. I also had to do the background separate from the characters and if I add any more character I'll probably have to break them up into layers.

 (click to enlarge) Note: this image will automatically update as I add new characters: so check back periodically

Ray Higgins
4D Fans

Been trying to see if I can figure out what's going on with the artifacts from using recursive backgrounds to build up a crowd scene (repeatedly using the same render image as background). What I've found out so far: It’s not anti-aliasing, it’s not output format, it’s not how you specify the background image (stretch, tile, fit), it’s not the output file format (tested jpg, bmp, png) it's not any lighting or atmosphere. Scaling does change it but does not reduce it,
Beginning to suspect that the problem is just inherent in the way your video card renders the images. Iclone uses your video card rendering capability which is optimized for real-time rendering, I suspect it is doing compression of images that with each iteration slightly deduces gradients associated with edges.

It looks like I will have to limit the number of recursive images to 4 or 5 iteration which will ultimately limit how big a crowd I can do,

I'm wondering if different video cards are better at this than others, Here is the base image I used and here is a typical distortion after 7 or 8 iteration(note mine includes a table full of extras that are rendered fresh with each iteration and so do not have any artifacts) To try it on your machine just add image to background and render it and then use the image as the background of the next iteration. generally by 5 of 6 it is quite noticeable and by 8 it starts to get ugly. please post you results


Ray Higgins
4D Fans