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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

That give me a result closer to what I'm looking for. I guess even

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
http://www.frameworkmedia.com