Quote from: Draigr on November 08, 2011, 06:52:18 PM
Render setting are low to speed up iterations. If I did a full render at 4 AA and .65 detail I'd literally be there all night. I think it takes about 12 hours, most likely more now. That's for 1024 by 1024. Clouds aren't affected by detail settings and the ground/water isn't important in the scene.
Spherical artefacts are caused by the spherical mapping.
Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
Spherical mapping of what?
I opened your file, got rid of the population, all the terrain and shaders, since you only see water.
Despite the water not being important, visually, it's definitely a source of the seams/artefacts you're seeing.
To fix this I increased the detail from 0.19, which is absolutely too low to expect any kind of correlation between the 6 sides of the cube, to 0.6.
I then increased AA from 1 to 4. AA1 is really really really too low. Even if you render with RTA and have tons of samples in your clouds. It just won't work for the aforementioned reason that the quality eventually is so low that you can't expect any correlation between the 6 sides of your cube.
To speed up rendertimes I reduced the cloud quality from 1 to 0.5.
A 400x400 frame takes roughly 4 minutes for me.
Despite these improvements there's still a visibile seam at the top and bottom of the image which I wasn't able to completely remove yet.
I used ray detail region padding up to 2 to make adjacent cube-faces account for shadows as well, helped a little, but not enough.
All in all I think the difficulty here lies in A)the dark atmosphere and bright lighting B) the dense and really thick clouds.
Even without GI there's too much difference in lighting conditions between each cube face.
A work-around would be to use more sensible settings for everything.
You have huge thick clouds which take very long to render, but you could also make smaller clouds which are less thick and blend them less out in the distance.
They will visually appear at the same position, but will render much faster.
If you don't touch things too much it shouldn't be too hard to do, as FrankB already pointed out.
Eventually you could post-work the skybox to get what you like.
All the problems with these skyboxes I've seen so far is with files where its settings have strongly deviated from the sensible default settings.
Another workaround is a previously made suggestion to change the FOV and render a lot more faces (with overlap). I believe it was Kadri who's suggesting that.
This way you should eventually be able to cover for the big differences in lighting everywhere.
Well, I hope things are a bit more clear now.
Cheers,
Martin
