Anyone ever found a way to fight "checkers" opacity artifacts? Random and extremely annoying while rendering with Super Sampling (2X2).

"checkers" opacity artifacts
Commonly Happen if the texture is overlap
check if the texture is overlapping
And increase self illumination   

One thing I do when I hit this is to increase the size of the opacity map.  Double or even quadruple its dimensions.
Another thing I've done which sometimes (not always) works is to just edit the opacity map and clean it up.  I think these artifacts occur when the jpeg compression does its thing.  It might come down to setting your jpeg quality settings very high when you save the map.

https://marketplace.reallusion.com/iclone/author/biggstrek

This issue has plagued me since iC6. Thought a beefier display card would fix it but it didn't. I have been told I will have to go to Windows 10, which I am dreading, to get a higher version of Direct X than my Windows 7 OS can use. But I do like what Biggs is saying and may need to try that...





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Well I must admit I was intrigued by Biggs' idea that a larger Opacity map might help and it still may make a different in some situations.
I replaced my original 256x256 96KB opacity map, for the "rays" in the above animation, with a 2000x2000 257KB map and could see no real difference, at least in my project.



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@jmusa    I know what you are saying, but overlapped texture produces different types of artifacts from what I am experiencing.

@BiggsTrek   I normally make fairly high resolution maps with reasonably low compression. Would not make a difference, really.

@mark   Yes indeed, high-end GPU does not seem to solve the problem. Although I think I see those artifacts less than I used to. Hard to judge - different project / different setup / props... etc
No Windows 10 for me for now. I hate win 8/10 interface.
BTW, nice lighting in that clip, mark!

After starting a thread, I recalled a trick someone introduced recently about rendering with smallest possible stage window. It did work! SS 2x2 did not render any artifacts on one 2 min. clip (I am yet to try another one where I had them most). And window size was not the smallest. At the moment I am rendering the same 2 minute clip at SS 3x3 with smallest possible window... but it helluva slow. Got to do more experimenting. Will post an outcome.
BTW, I do not do DOF until it is fixed.


Thanks!

Not much to report other than - all artifacts are completely gone once I have a fairly small viewport window during rendering - SS 2x2 and 3x3.
Funny thing is that I am afraid once RL fix this: https://www.reallusion.com/FeedBackTracker/Issue/Make-DOF-not-affected-by-Viewport-size-in-Workspace
this workaround taking artifacts out would stop working altogether.

PNG will be better than JPEG for opacity because it has no compression artifacts.

Totally agree. And I suppose you can make a png map with smaller image dimensions to keep "space hungry" PNG weight less. Need to try as well.

Now that sounds like a great idea. I hadn't thought of using a .png which I do love.  Here I substituted a 2000x2000 .png for the .jpg and as you can see, at least on my system, it made no difference. By the way I am working in iClone 7 at this point. The issue was also in iC6 but not in iC5. I have uploaded the iproject to DropBox would love for any and all to try it especially those with Windows 10 and a beefy display card to see if you get better results or eliminate the issue all together. You'll notice that some camera angles don't have a problem while others certainly do.
Feel free to try any and all options to get acceptable results.   Here's the DropBox link for the iClone project...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7veydbcyq9vkvyh/%21%20PNG%20OPACITY%20MAP.iProject?dl=0



 



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