703 Hours, 19 minutes, 47 seconds

[old_blaggard]

Nice image, but as everyone has said... 700 hours?

[rcallicotte]

I just wanted to see what I could do.  Once it started, and I realized it would be a while longer than anticipated, I had no idea it would take that long.  And then, after it's been going for so long is almost half way there, why stop it?

I'm glad I waited.

Nice image, but as everyone has said... 700 hours?

[3DGuy]

Nice picture, but if rendering anything on that res takes a month... jeez. Wonder why it took so long. There's no water, hardly or no texture on the mountains, no sky to speak of and just some low clouds for mist if I'm not mistaken.

[Oshyan]

Have you gotten home yet Calico?

- Oshyan

[Buzzzzz]

not worth 700 hours, maybe 24 or less

Agree, And I"m wondering  how much it cost in Electric and Ware & Tear on your cpu. 700 hours is Insane. Must commend you on your patience though.

[rcallicotte]

Image size - 2400X1440
Detail - .65
AA - 3
GI Relative Detail - 2
GI Sample Quality - 1
GI Surface Detail - yes
Contrast setting - 0.325
Gamma correction - 0.85

Environment light - 1.2 AMBIENT OCCULUSION

There were clouds, very low density and very low to the ground - 172 quality

I had some basic, yet somewhat complex shaders.  I think everything contributed to the length of time, but it is mostly the ambient occlusion.  I know many of you will say I overdid it, but I played with various settings until I got what I was looking for.  Could it have been done differently? - yes and no.  For what I wanted to do, I don't think so.  For someone else who could make it similar to what I did, it could look like it.  Yet, without these settings I wouldn't have what I wanted.

This was drastic, which means I don't plan to do it again any time soon, and things will be faster someday when TG2 is released.

[Oshyan]

It's surprising that it took that long - those settings are fairly moderate, aside the resolution. What about atmosphere samples? Did you use a reflective or water shader?

- Oshyan

[rcallicotte]

No reflection.  No water.

32 Atmospheric samples.  But, my wisps of clouds (with the suns visibly shooting through them) had special settings.  I noted a couple.

Could it be I only have a 3GHz P4?  No Core processors.

[Oshyan]

I suppose the clouds could have something to do with it. A 3Ghz P4 should be fine - not the fastest thing around, but remember that TG2 isn't multithreaded yes to multi-core doesn't really matter.

Were you doing other things with the machine while it rendered?

- Oshyan

[bigben]

Nice to see someone say why not in spite of everything. 

[RealUser]

Nice scene, but over 700 hrs? I would have stop it after 24 hrs latest.

[rcallicotte]

I checked my email and did some surfing, but nothing drastic.  I always checked the amount of RAM.  Interesting note:  whenever I opened up a program that took some obvious RAM, TG2 would increase its RAM concurrently.  When I would exit the other program, and the RAM from this other program was released, I would always see TG2 release the extra RAM it had taken and TG2's RAM would go back to what it was.  This was always at the same time and it was consistent throughout.  I had a lot of time to watch.   

I suppose the clouds could have something to do with it. A 3Ghz P4 should be fine - not the fastest thing around, but remember that TG2 isn't multithreaded yes to multi-core doesn't really matter.

Were you doing other things with the machine while it rendered?

- Oshyan

[chefc]

Wow insane render time Excellent results

[Mohawk20]

Just so you don't stand alone Calico... I have 2 pc's, one a 3 Ghz and one a 2.2 Ghz. And I've been rendering a few animations. All thos took a moth or longer. I had two animations in the making simultaniously the last month. One still running... 230 hours for the last 10 frames. That's a 1024x768 animation which is cropped and gets bigger to fill the whole screen. So if you're used to that, 700 hours doesn't sound that long.

However, for just one image... My animations had 200 frames at the least. I think the resolution made it take as long as it did.

[mrpiddly]

LOL, thats a long time for terragen to be running. I used my schools server once, perfectly fine, to render an image. When you can set the ammount of ram it uses to really high levels, it speeds things up alot. It must had slowed somthing down a bit but luckily i did it at like 12:00pm and it was finished at around 4:30.