"Sven Littkowski" <sve### [at] jamaica-focuscom> wrote:

> Tom, you say that this could be the reason for the flickering, right? What
> can I do to get rid of the flickering? Setting the ambient down to 1.0? and
> what else? Any way to change the sampling, and would that help?

Turn off radiosity. It doesn't usually do anything for space renders that
you can't do with ordinary lights. Keep the textures as is, mimic the
window lighting effect of radiosity using spotlights with fade_power and
fade_distance set, or if you want it easier, use post-production effects to
achieve the lighting bloom (for which you'd probably want an external 2D
paint application).

The reasons for the flicker, I'm guessing, are to do with the way that
radiosity works (see the manual, 3.3.4 for a few more details on it). Your
scene is a problem for radiosity, because you've got rapid changes in
ambient light over a small area (your windows) - this damages one of the
approximations that radiosity works under. When a radiosity patch is
sampled, a large number of rays are sent out from it to estimate the
indirect illumination falling on it (as described in the docs). Half the
problem is probably that your windows are so small that they are likely
missed by many samples. The other half of the problem is that your
viewpoint is changing, so different samples are taken each frame, giving
rise to flicker as a window is sampled differently (or not at all) in some
frames to others. The flicker is so strong because your windows have such
high ambient values.

Increasing the radiosity quality settings (like "Count") and decreasing the
ambient setting for the windows would help, but I don't think this will
completely remove the effects - radiosity just wasn't optimised for this
sort of scene, as I understand it.

Tom

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