Strange seams?

Dismembered

So I have been working on a new project, for longer that I would have liked and I have gotten to the rendering stages. Well I have been running across a bit of a hiccup. When I render there seems to be a normal seem running down the side of the street lamp. But I decided to take the normals off to see if that was the problem and the seam was still there, and I did the same for the diffuse.

I did notice that if I do a close up render the seam is gone and the further away I get the worse the seam seems to get, which confuses me. Does anyone know why this is happening, or how to fix it?

Mark Dygert

Probably need more edge padding? It looks like the "void" or negative space around your UV shells is bleeding into your image area. This happens quite a bit with textures that are "MipMapped". The solution normally is to bump up the padding around the UV shells.

Dismembered

I am not sure that is the problem. The problem areas have nothing but a default shader applied. Is there any other possibility? And as I stated the "seam" only shows up from a distance.

renderhjs

try adding a tesselation modifier to it, to subdivide the model without changing its shape. Tesseleation usually fixes rendering issues like wonky shadow maps or stuff like that. I think its the renderer that sometimes does approximations within its optimizations to run better.

Dismembered

try adding a tesselation modifier to it,...

Tried this and I am still getting the same results.

Eric Chadwick

How is this being rendered? Realtime or offline? Which software, what settings? Any textures on the model? Can you show the UVs?

Dismembered

-3ds max
-Mental Ray (Final gather enabled, Lanczos filter)
-The "seam" shows up whether it has a texture on it or not. Pictured above is just has a default shader on it.

Here are the UVs.

Eric Chadwick

I bet it doesn't happen with the scanline renderer? Probably something in your final gather settings. Tweaking time!

Oh, it could be that your mesh is duplicated there, like doubled-up faces. Have you checked for this?

Dismembered

Well it wasn't doubled faces, but it was definitely something in my FG settings, just as a quick test I turned the preset up from draft to medium and viola it was gone. I am going to have to spend a bit of time to figure out exactly what caused it, thanks so much Eric!

Eric Chadwick

Ah cool. Yeah draft can be noisy, that's why it's fast! Try setting it back to draft, and increasing the Rays per FG Point... ? Been a while since I messed around in there.

Dismembered

Nope, it ended up being Initial FG Point Density. Had to turn it up to about .8 for the "seam" to disappear.