New Stones Test and $350 dollar render

[fleetwood]

Trying out the new inputs to fake stones. Tallness modifier and Scale modifier. Using power fractals as the modifier at this point.
This is just one single  layer of stones of size two meters. The modifiers give the look of more layers.

This render ended up costing me $350. I burned out the mother board on my computer while rendering it during a heat wave.
I stupidly had five layers of cloud defined, all set at quality 1. With defer atmosphere set on. The pre-rendering stage took 8 hours before any final render buckets started to fill in.
After about 18 hours I had to leave the house to take my sister to the hotel as it was too hot for her at her apartment. It's been muggy and about 90 around here for a few days.
So when I got back home my render was no longer running and my computer would not start. When I took it to the shop and they tried a substitute power supply the mother board literally caught on fire before they could shut it off. So now I'm up and running again and boosted my memory to 16 gig which is all the slots I have.

Oh well, live and learn. I disabled one global layer of cloud, set all the four other cloud layers down to about 0.6 quality, reduced the voxel allocations to a combined total of around  30 meg and backed off on the atmosphere sampling to "only" 64 and got this render in 5 hours, but the pre-render with multiple cloud layers still takes much of the time.
Clearly I need to learn some new rules of thumb for the new cloud system.

[yossam]

That makes two of us with the new rules..............nice pic and sorry about your MB. 

[Dune]

Hell of a story. Sorry about your machine, and good that you mention this; I'm working in a small room which is rather hot these days.
I think it's good practise to check each cloud layer for grain with defer atmo off, raise quality until satisfied, then check other layers, and atmo itself. Defer takes much longer and isn't always needed if you use higher AA for plants anyway.

[bobbystahr]

Defer takes much longer and isn't always needed if you use higher AA for plants anyway.

I've noticed this as well...now I can use higher AA......till the months end....5 or 6 daze left on the BETA

[inkydigit]

Cool stones!
Bummer about the mb...

J

[fleetwood]

It's odd, when I first began using Terragen I always used defer atmosphere by a misunderstanding of something I read. This continued for a year of so. Eventually I realized all that render time spent using defer atmo wasn't normally needed, so currently I practically never set defer on with T3.

But now my first  test  clouds with T4 were terribly grainy or noisy even when set at cloud quality 1 and big voxel buffers and rendering at detail 0.8 and AA 8.

Noticing that "defer" is now the default setting in the render node, I perhaps wrongly guessed that the new voxelized clouds were intended to use defer atmo for best results. 
It used to be that a high enough cloud quality setting and no defer would look essentially the same as lower quality with defer on, with the no defer optioon being preferred as much faster.
Simply haven't found the no noise balance point in T4 yet.

[Kadri]

Sorry for the bad luck. Good that you are running ones again now at least.

I try not to use more then 1 layer of clouds if not absolutely needed.
Mostly it is maximum 2 general and 1 local cloud layer.

[DannyG]

This render ended up costing me $350. I burned out the mother board on my computer while rendering it during a heat wave.

I have found that the current Beta is extremely taxing, my CPU temps have been redlining a lot lately, hopefully the same doesn't happen to me

[Kadri]

...
I have found that the current Beta is extremely taxing, my CPU temps have been redlining a lot lately, hopefully the same doesn't happen to me

It looked to me that Terragen was always more taxing then other software i tried.
Not sure if the Beta is different then TG 3 of course.

[masonspappy]

This render ended up costing me $350. I burned out the mother board on my computer while rendering it during a heat wave.

I have found that the current Beta is extremely taxing, my CPU temps have been redlining a lot lately, hopefully the same doesn't happen to me

Fleetwood, hate to hear that about your mobo - something I've noticed lately is that every once in a great while my CPU cooler fans rev up like an airplane getting ready to take off.  Did not think that was due to new Beta TG, but looking at other comments here  I'm starting to wonder.

[AP]

It is good to see the Fake stones shader functions being used more and what happened to your Motherboard, sorry to hear. The functions are a series of trials and errors though, at times there can be a lot of fine noise displacement that can be rather messy. Perhaps using blue nodes would suffice or just higher octaves to lessen the fine noise. There is so much more testing that is required.

I have to be careful with clouds as well. Some of the more dense and multi-layered skies start to make rendering rather heavy. It is hard because depending on the setting that is required, something overcast or stormy as examples.

[DocCharly65]

Intersting pic and sorry about your MB!

[fleetwood]

Just the rocks after much tweaking.
Paq's grass and cosmos from Terragen pack.

[Kadri]

Looks good.

[AP]

The rock details and color stands out quite well. Good tweaks.