Fixing 'terminator' effect and other rendering artifacts in Cycles
Actually the most well-know problem is the 'terminator artifact' what produces blackish/flattish surfaces when rendering low-poly geometry. It is a serious problem when working with very optimized objects (for large scenes) or working with typically game-related content (like rendering game trailers, etc.)
Link: developer.blender.org/T37814
There is another issue related to Cycles rendering, it is the distance from the origin where only 400 unit away from the origin we get blackish artifacts, too.
Link: developer.blender.org/T51548
I suggest to read the detailed infos on the links.
Thanks
6 Comments
Absolutely agree, it is a serious problem and should be resolved. Increasing the subdivisions the problem remains, simply less visible because the polygons are smaller, if you enlarge the problem is always visible. I did a quick test, Redshift and Arnold work quite well.
Indeed, one of the most important suggestion.
It's great that you've included links to active bug reports, but aside from "fix it", is there an actionable suggestion in here on how a developer might go about doing such a thing? Perhaps a whitepaper or research article that details a solution?
Otherwise, this isn't much of a feature proposal. It's more like a bug report.
On the bug report side they suggested to submit it here. I cannot do more for it; for the distance problem I checked that it could be solved (as you could read it on the link). As I'm not a researcher/coder, that is what I could do: mark the problem and say that it could be solved (as others were able to solve it somehow). Hopefully someone more expert could link/find the requested methods for that.
It's not a bug but a deliberate approximation made for rendering efficiency. See this paper . Although some modern render engines like Mantra and Mental Ray seem to have found ways to bypass the problem, other big render engines like Renderman, Vray and 3Delight still have it. Maybe Arnold does too but googling something with "Arnold" and "terminator" hardly gives anything else than this . Bad coincidence. So as I said in the task, to me this is no more of a bug report than asking to "fix" the fireflies in Cycles. We can get rid of both but with some additional features.
In fact Brecht pointed out that there has been some work on the terminator artifact here although it doesn't solve the problem entirely.
Proof from (current) VRay or Renderman?