Canadian Lake

[Henry Blewer]

Here's the tgd for the image/render that has caused the latest fuss.

[RArcher]

Just took a little look and there are a couple things that you can do different that should save you a lot of rendertime.  First being the GI Surface details - I really don't think you are going to see any benefit by having this on and it increases rendertime by a huge amount.  Also you increased the Subdiv cache to 800, was there a particular reason why you would do this?  From what I remember you are using a very aging computer.  The default cache setting should be perfectly fine here if not lowered slightly due to the amount of objects you have in the scene.

Also, you should be able to eliminate the two extra compute normal nodes you have added if you keep your major displacement (redirect and strata) prior to the compute terrain node in the terrain panel.

[Henry Blewer]

I increased the Subdiv cache to speed things up, I thought. I have plenty of RAM most of the time.
Frank B recommends using GI quality and sampling. It does effect the overall lighting. But in this case it may not be needed.
I placed the strata and redirect shaders in the rock shader layer to limit their effect to the steep slopes.
The second compute terrain is is handle the displacement offsets. Compute normals handle lateral displacements.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this. I really appreciate it. Good advise from a T2 artist as good as you are is gold.

[Tangled-Universe]

Thanks for sharing this. I think this is again an interesting terrain and POV to make something very nice.

I haven't had time to check it out though, but I see Ryan already tackled some important issues.

In regard to GI surface details: this feature can add more details in shadows which are very small.
I haven't experienced a situation where I really needed this feature yet and in the recent years I made quite some different types of images.
In the cases GI surface details might give a better result then there's probably another way of achieving the same result without the huge increase of rendertime.

In regard to the compute terrain. I'd always check if I'd really need the extra compute terrains/normals, even though my sense/knowledge tells me otherwise.
Often when performing the major displacements before the compute terrain and then some small other displacements after that you won't really need an extra compute terrain by definition. For absolute accurate results in constraints and object placement you would need it, but often by eye-balling you will see it isn't really necessary.

Here's a must-read on compute normals/terrains by Matt:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1249.msg12539#msg12539