Grainy Render with TG2 ?

[MaxHeadroom]

Hi Guys, Just got TG2 and still trying to get to grips with it. Ive done a couple of renders with default settings and used the alpine Fractal with amazing results. Then I started to get dreative and this is when i started to have problems.##

I've generated a power fractal terrain and then added some childs , basically im following the First Scene PDF for TG2 on the planet side Website. I've lowered the sun untill its just above the horizon but behind the mountains and then ran into the problem of the atmosphere shining through the mountain ! I did a bit of reading and found advice indication that enabling ray tracing in the quality tab for the atmosphere would resolve this issue. Well it does sort of but now the render is REALLY grainy and the render times are MASSIVE. Could someone show me how to get the effect im after < basically a sunset behind some mountains> without MASSIVE render times . Any help is appreciated

[PG]

First thing to reduce graininess would be to increase the samples on the atmosphere layer to, say, 64. If you're doing a sunset then the samples will be thinly spread on the default setting. If you've got clouds in the way you'll also need to increase the samples of those to a nominal degree.
Hard to say what's causing your render times without knowing what settings you're using.

[Henry Blewer]

If you are using T2.2 (not T2.1), the atmosphere quality is now controlled by the AA in the render settings tab.

You'll need the check the raytrace atmosphere in the render tab to use the AA slider for atmosphere quality.

[Oshyan]

If you are using T2.2 (not T2.1), the atmosphere quality is now controlled by the AA in the render settings tab.

Correction: the atmosphere quality is *influenced* by the AA (antialiasing) setting. You can sort of think of it like GI Relative Detail in that one setting is relative to and influenced by another. In other words if you are using Raytrace Atmosphere and you have an AA of 3 and atmosphere samples of 16, you may get some noise. Increasing AA would decrease the noise, and so would increasing the atmosphere samples, just like how changing GI Relative detail *or* the main Detail setting can affect the resulting level of GI detail. That being said in both cases - with AA and Main Detail - changes to these settings affect more than just atmosphere noise, so if you are satisfied with all other elements of your scene as far as quality/noise, it would be better to just adjust the atmosphere samples alone. Remember though that with raytraced atmosphere, you won't need to increase it as much. So let's say you have AA of 6 and atmosphere samples of 16 and it's noisy. Try 32 atmosphere samples, you probably don't need to jump to 64.

- Oshyan

[Henry Blewer]

Sorry Oshyan.
I have been having good results on the tests I have done just increasing the AA in the render tab. I have noticed that the clouds look better with more samples/higher quality settings. I've noticed they don't need to be quite as high as I used to set them.

Thanks for the explanation.