playblast light and ramp not smooth - banding effect

[Tom]

Hello there,

I'm having troubles with playblast on Maya 2016 viewport 2.0

In the viewport the gradients/ramps/lighting are smooth but on the playblast it's not, creating a banding effect  (see images below).

This happends whatever codec I use, either h264 or image sequences such as .jpg

Does anyone have an idea to fix this? Also the playblasts are more green than the viewport.

Thanks

[Steve Davy]

Not specifically, but I did notice that in the preferences there are some options for the viewport hardware renderer. I haven't really looked at them but you might.

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From: maya...@googlegroups.com <maya...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Tom <gobg...@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, April 6, 2018 9:20 AM
To: maya_he3d
Subject: [maya_he3d] playblast light and ramp not smooth - banding effect

 

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[Tom]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I haven't found anything useful in the preferences.

[Juri Fripp]

Maya's viewport 2.0 defaults to viewing at 32 bit float within the viewer which has no banding issues. If you playblast out to exr instead of jpg it will output to 32 bit float which will not have the banding issues, but at the cost of large files.

Also the banding issue becomes a lot more apparent when colour management is turned on.

The best method I have found to playblast without banding is to turn colour management off and render to a jpg sequence check it and if their is too much  banding playblast to exr.

[Tom]

Thanks for your help, I tried but exr is not available as a format for playblast. Disabling the colour management helps but I prefer to keep it on for the rest of my workflow.

One thing that seems to work is to do a batch render with Maya Hardware 2.0 and there is no banding here - like the viewport. 

But it's a bit heavier as a process than playblasting and also I can't render .mov like this, they don't write.

[Steve Davy]

I missed your reference to H264 and JPG. You say "whatever the codec" but are they the only two methods you've used?

Both are very compressed formats. Try outputting to a TIF sequence or to a Quicktime with Animation compression. Failing that, output uncompressed -- if that gets rid of it you know it's compression that is the issue (seems likely anyway).

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From: maya...@googlegroups.com <maya...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Tom <gobg...@gmail.com>

Sent: Saturday, April 7, 2018 7:15 AM
To: maya_he3d
Subject: Re: [maya_he3d] playblast light and ramp not smooth - banding effect

 

[Tom]

Yes it also happens in other formats like tif, png, tga or quicktime animation. It also happens when outputting uncompressed.

So I don't think it's compression related, also when doing a batch render in jpg the image is smooth. I guess it's the way the playblast are created.

[Roy Nieterau]

Does the MAYA_FLOATING_POINT_RT_PLAYBLAST environment variable help?

Have a look here under the Color Management tab: http://download.autodesk.com/us/support/files/maya_2016/Maya_2016_EXT1_SP6_enu.htm
It states:

To obtain the fix for this issue, set MAYA_FLOATING_POINT_RT_PLAYBLAST to 1.

You'd need to set it prior to launching Maya.
Does that fix it?

[Tom]

Thank you!! That's it, now it works as expected.

I don't know how you found this but thanks a lot.

For those who don't know how to add environment variables (like me) :

edit the maya.env file in the maya pref folder and add this line :

MAYA_FLOATING_POINT_RT_PLAYBLAST = 1