Rescale noise...?

[Henry Blewer]

Thank you for sharing the tgc file. I am beginning to understand the function nodes, but I am a long way from using them effectively.

[dandelO]

Weird render settings!
To get an extremely clean looking function render in the very small or sharp details I've found it best to use 'Ray trace everything' in the renderer, even an AA of 2 will give cleaner results than a render detail of '1' without RTE. All the flat 2D images have AA=2

The problem using RTE is that once you introduce displacement, the surface of the planet, even at render detail '1' is terribly optimized.

RTE, detail=1, AA=4...
[attachimg=#]

To get around it and have a lovely smooth RTE render with displacement you'll want to first disable GI relative detail, create a fill lighting instead(because of the next step) and then raise the render detail to way past '1', until you find a good balance of displacement and subdivision.

The 1280px image on the 2nd page was RTE, detail=8, AA=4. The 700px image was RTE, detail=10, AA=4.
You'd be alarmed using detail '10' in most cases but here it's the cleanest option and it's still fast to render since there is no GI used, the detail slider is really only being used to smooth the planet surface and do the shadows.

[dandelO]

Last one of these. Rescaled

RTE, Detail=10, AA=3. Still a little raggedy at some of the extreme edges, but nice and smooth displacements.

[Kadri]

Try it on clouds  
Not sure DandelO but i think it would be smoother and maybe render faster too.
Yeah , i see clouds everywhere recently

[dandelO]

Good idea...

[dandelO]

Quick clouds.
[attachimg=#]

[Kadri]

How is the render time comparing to the planet object ,DandelO ?

[dandelO]

Depending on the clouds, it's both quicker and longer. At the density above, which was edge sharpness=100 and density=1, it would take much longer to do a big render than the planet. But with less samples required for less dense clouds, it's much quicker than the planet and you don't need to increase the render detail. A balancing act...

[Kadri]

Depending on the clouds, it's both quicker and longer. At the density above, which was edge sharpness=100 and density=1, it would take much longer to do a big render than the planet. But with less samples required for less dense clouds, it's much quicker than the planet and you don't need to increase the render detail. A balancing act...

Curious about the new bigger one with greater detail!

[Oshyan]

Depending on the clouds, it's both quicker and longer. At the density above, which was edge sharpness=100 and density=1, it would take much longer to do a big render than the planet. But with less samples required for less dense clouds, it's much quicker than the planet and you don't need to increase the render detail. A balancing act...

Is that *with* raytraced atmosphere, and if so what sample level and antialaising value?

- Oshyan

[dandelO]

Yes, with RTA. The small one with clouds above took me about 10 minutes for me to render on 2 cores. There were 2 cloud layers, around 60 cloud samples each which was quality=1. AA was 4 with 1/16 sampling.

I edited the clouds and managed to bring it down a lot by lowering the quality and densities but I haven't optimized a full render for clouds yet.

The first 700px surface image on page 2 took 15 minutes to render with ray trace everything and the render detail tweaks I mentioned before.

[Oshyan]

Cool, thanks for the details. I'm always interested in how these settings affect various scenarios, especially unusual ones like this. There are settings coming in a future update that will allow you to tune the raytraced terrain detail (including sub-surface detail!) separately from master detail, thus allowing you to more easily use GI, or get more detailed underwater terrain without tricks. In the case of your RTA terrain renders, you would just increase the detail multiplier for raytraced terrain.

- Oshyan

[dandelO]

I know, I know! Last one, for now.

I don't think this shader is on the periodic table.

Almost got rid of the jaggies with render detail=12 and AA=6. I used 1/16th minimum samples, I wish I could have left that at 1/4 or higher but the 15 minute 1280p render from page 2 has turned into a 1h15m render at this setting already. Maybe AA=4 with max samples would do it, I might go again...

[attachimg=#]

Bigger here.

[j meyer]

 
In case you're still interested this is what came up with
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750m+1500m camera height btw.
I hope it'll be useful for you or anyone else.
Cheers,J.

[dandelO]

Just a note on the above render settings I posted.

Render detail=12, which was what my last render setting ended up being for smooth displacement on the planet surface in this scene, is equivalent now (in TG2.3) to; Render detail='1' + Ray detail multiplier='4'.

* This still seems to lengthen the GI prepass time at the moment but nowhere near as much as the previous 2.2 settings of 'render detail=12'. (4x as quick as that would be? I think so...) So, still best to keep GI detail relatively low, or off completely but it's definitely much more usable now if you can balance it out, I'm loving it!

I can ditch the fill lighting in this scene easily now, anyway.

Great feature, can't wait for the element-based ray detail multiplier that you mention, Oshyan!