Quote from: usertm on March 21, 2011, 05:59:25 PM
Hm,
I was following the info I had read about when there is noise to increase the atmo to no more than 128 samples, and clouds 128 max as well? Is this not correct?
No, that's not correct.
Unfortunately there's a lot of bad info on the forums in regard to rendersettings.
The best thread is the render recommendation thread, as it has everything centralized.
It's indeed rare to need more than 128 atmo samples, though I can point you to works here which required (far) more. So in general it's correct that you shouldn't go beyond 128, but the majority of works require 64 at most (depending on the type of lighting etc. etc.).
You may have seen that I did not mention cloud samples specifically, since it isn't the number of samples which determines the amount of noise, it's the number of samples which are required to get a certain detail level/setting.
Why is this?
Dense and tall clouds need a LOT more samples to achieve "quality 1" than thin flat clouds.
For dense tall clouds you could for example need 512 samples to have quality 1, but for thin flat clouds it could be 20 samples only for example.
Therefore the detail setting is much more useful info.
This confusion and mis-understanding of these principles is one of the things the forums are flooded with.
I haven't even addressed how these things change when switching from regular rendering to ray traced rendering of the atmosphere.
This render settings recommendations thread I mentioned is important
