new user (bear with me) render problems

[wasted04]

Im very new to this and am having incredible frustrating problems with rendering an image (started with the simple Ben Macduff mountain)
Im getting errors it seems with whatever settings i choose - the errors are trace ray and bucket and message about cache size and also programme crashes

i have intel core i7, 8 cores , and 12gb of Ram

im currently working through resolutions and various cache sizes to try and find a good fit - is there any simple rule of thumb i should be using
currently attempting a 1920x1080 (my desktop size) render with quality 1, anti ailising 2, min thread 0, max thread 4, sub div cache 400mb, bucket 256, atmos quality 18 samples....so far so good task manager shows about 53% of cpu being used and about 3gb of ram

i have tried with 6 threads and 1200mb of cache but it errored and didnt omplete without black spaces

anyone give any pointers to what i should be able to achieve? i appreciate each image is different so this may be difficult to do

incidentally i want to render as large as possible in order i dont have to enlarge with photoshop after

any pointers appreciated
Doug

[cyphyr]

Welcome to the forum wasted

The first thing I would do is reset everything in your scene to default settings (except render dimensions). Render it as is and see if it completes. If it dose not then there is possibly a problem with the Ben Macduff file (it may have become corrupted, re-download and try again).
You can get rayTrace errors if your using very small scales in your power fractals, try to stay higher than 0.01.
Once you have it capable of rendering at the size you want start to bring up the detail and AA. You should not often need to go as high as Detail=1, try 0.7 AA=5
Hope this helps and do post an image, it always helps
Cheers
Richard

[wasted04]

hi richard
thanks should have said i created the file from the tutorial so its not downloaded
i'll check the power fractals setting as i cant recall off hand what they are, is there a quick way to reset defaults?

[cyphyr]

No but if you open up a second instance of terragen you can see what they should be.

Richard

[wasted04]

  thanks i'll do that and go off and experiment to see what happens - i'll report back

[Oshyan]

TraceRay errors are often the result of memory issues. Are you sure you're running the 64 bit version of Terragen 2? I would suggest *not* changing the render buffer sizes at all, they are set to work fairly well automatically and there is little benefit in changing the size in most cases.

- Oshyan

[wasted04]

64 bit definitely - i reset it all to default and its min max threads are now 1 and 64 and i had no problems rendering - guilty of fiddlng with settings i guess :O)