My result with the Golden Forest tutorial

[geoffroy0123]

Hi all !

Yesterday I discoverd Terragen 2. I've tried it a long time ago but I tought it was too difficult. But yestarday I decided to retry it! 

I've followed the wonderfull tutorial from RArcher and here is my result, my first render with terragen 2:


It is a little bit noisy. I didn't make the grass very good. It looks like a forest in the sand. The reason is that my computer is not a supercalculator so I decided not to add too many objects. 5 hours to make this 800x500 render !!

[FrankB]

Hi, this is looking good. I hope the tutorial could help you understand more about how TG2 works.

With a scene like this, you can easily switch the renderer to "ray trace everything". This will likely speed up your render IF you find the right settings.
You could try:
- set atmo samples to 24
- set cloud quality to 1
- set quality in the renderer to 0.4
- set GI to 2/2
- set AA to 2
- remember to set "ray trace everything" in the extra tab of the render node

I've created a similar scence: sunset, low front light, fog layer, even soft light was switched on, dense vegetation of grasses, bushes and trees, and a 600x400 render finishes in 3 minutes (on an i7 920 8 threads).
Granted, this is medium quality, but not too bad actually. If you want to increase quality, increase the AA to 3, or 4. Setting it to 3 will already double the render time.

- Frank

[geoffroy0123]

Thanks for your advices ! I'm going to test !

[FrankB]

I've let this render bigger and with some extra quality settings such as increased atmo and cloud samples, trying to get the best bang for the buck, in render time vs quality.

The attached picture is the outcome. Not great, but impressive in the light of just 31 minutes render time, I'd say.
1600px wide and 31 minutes rendertime. This was rendered with RTE, quality 0.6, GI 2/3, soft light, two cloud layers, 80 atmo samples, and AA only at 2 (!).
I bet with AA3 this would already be quite good and still just 1 hour render time (anticipated).

Cheers,
Frank

[MacGyver]

I think your result has a unique feel to it thanks to the sand... generally I don't think it hurts the image or takes away from realism.
Impressive outcome Frank!