Terragen 4 Open Beta – Very noise on clouds

[MCGabler]

I'm testing Terragen 4 Beta two weeks ago and I liked very much the new features, specially the EasyClouds with multi-scattering, which have a very realistic look.

However, on the tests that I did with the Atmosphere, I noticed that the clouds stayed with very noise in the renders. I was using quality 1 for clouds, which is the maximum of the slider.
I tried increase the quality settings of various items (Atmosphere, GI Settings, Anti-aliasing, etc.), without success. The only thing that worked was to increase the quality cloud for values greater than 1, but it increases proportionally the render time.

Below are the images of some tests I did.

Global settings:

- Atmosphere > Quality > Number of samples: 32

- Sunlight > Do soft shadows: on

- Render > Quality > Micropoly detail: 0.8
                              > Anti-aliasing: 2

- GI Settings > GI in Clouds > Cloud GI Quality: Still / Very high

[attachimg=1]

I would like to know is if this is the correct way to work with the clouds. Is there another way to get clouds with more quality?

[KlausK]

Hello

You might want to take a look at this thread. Some useful information about cloud quality settings in tg4 beta.
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18330.15.html

Meanwhile I give you a quote from Oshyan:
>>
Yes, Defer Atmo is intended to be enabled by default now. This does mean that your renderer Antialiasing then affects cloud quality! The Quality slider in the cloud layer is a relative quality adjuster that operates with the number of AA samples to determine final cloud quality (noise level). If you need to use high AA, for example 6 or above, you might want to reduce cloud quality a bit to compensate (unless you find that the cloud still renders noisy). Just remember that AA4-6 or so is usually adequate for *cloud only* scenes with cloud quality 1 (with Defer enabled).
- Oshyan
<<

Hope that helps for starters.
cheers, Klaus

[MCGabler]

KlausK,

I read the post that you indicated. I understand better the operation of Terragen 4, it was very helpful.
I'll continue testing the beta and trying to find a more appropriate setting.

Thank you very much for your reply!

[Oshyan]

Reducing noise in the clouds will almost always require longer render times. Unfortunately that's how rendering tends to go at this point: more samples = less noise but longer render time. With the current Defer Atmo default, it is best to adjust AA with cloud quality at 1. You can consider using different Adaptive sampling levels and Noise Thresholds with a constant AA. For example AA 4 or 6, but reducing the Noise Threshold, rather than increasing AA to 8 or more.

- Oshyan