Alpine VS. PF

[TheBadger]

IN my current project I used a alpine PF rather than a normal PF. I thought it gave me some nice details right way that a PF wont. Plus, I like some of the settings that I can play with in the alpine.

Now I know from other threads that the alpine takes longer to render. And I am seeing a lot of render time increase, especially in the 3D preview. But I reduced the scale of the alpine by massive amounts, and I thought that would decrease render time. (I reduced size for look, not render time) But I thought it would help. It does not.

So to be clear, scale and such has no effect on render time, where the alpine is concerned? I mean, an Alpine will always take longer no mater what?

Its also, I find, not as stable. I find that it can be easier to make TG crash when using alpines instead of PFs. Is this true for others? It is prettier than a normal PF though.

Now if you want to know what I am doing, I masked out a alpine to appear as spires in various places. Then added some blending PF to smooth the effect/transitions. Works better I found then just a normal PF as the main displacement.

[bobbystahr]

Yup it is a difficult one to work with and IIRC was almost not included in Ver.3+

[AP]

The Alpine shader very rarely seems to give me any troubles and I am on a quad core ultra book. For realism it is well worth it, at least until erosion is available then all of that changes. It will always take somewhat longer because it is merely not a perlin or rigid noise but it does more underneath it's surface.

[Oshyan]

As Chris says, it will always take longer to render. Absolute scale doesn't have a notable effect on render time. It's the *number of octaves* ("Noise octaves") that will affect render time a lot, particularly with large(r) numbers. The more octaves, the more times it has to iterate the generation phase of the noise function, essentially.

- Oshyan