A FakeStone Island

[bobbystahr]

Don't give up just yet. Are you sure something isn't running in the background? Probably the detail and AA I suppose....

I wish I understood all about graphic cards and RAM and Giga this and Tera that, because it always seems that something doesn't jive when your drive shows like a tenth used and renders go so slow. Someone could explain it to me for a week and I would still not get it, so I go with what I got too.

Nothing else running(this is the terragen only machine)and Task Manager shows all 8 cores at 100% and 10.1 gigs of ram in use...

[Matt]

I wish I understood all about graphic cards and RAM and Giga this and Tera that, because it always seems that something doesn't jive when your drive shows like a tenth used and renders go so slow. Someone could explain it to me for a week and I would still not get it, so I go with what I got too.

Your hard drive is like a bookshelf and file cabinet combined. Whether your bookshelf file cabinet is 10% full or 90% full doesn't really affect how quickly you can read a book; it mostly just affects how many books and files you can keep in your house. While you're reading a book (rendering an image in Terragen), this usually isn't important.

You could think of a program such as Terragen as one of the books. When you run a program you take it off the shelf/hard drive and start reading/running it.

When you're reading a book, two things that greatly affect your speed and comprehension are your thinking speed and your short term memory. These are your CPU (processor) and RAM. CPU speed (which is affected by GHz as well as the number of cores) is how fast your brain works. RAM is your short term memory which affects how big a problem or idea you can hold in your head at once. This is like the complexity of your scene in Terragen (e.g. how many trees, how detailed each model tree is). Most of the time the size of your RAM has almost no effect on render speed. But if the problem becomes bigger than you can keep in short term memory, then you have to use pen and paper to write things down as you go, or consult other pages to remind yourself of something, and this makes you slower than someone who can keep a bigger problem in their short term memory. Similarly, running out of RAM in the middle of a render can make Terragen become hundreds of times slower because it starts writing things down in a file on the bookshelf instead of using short term memory.

RAM is typically measured in Gigabytes and is completely separate from hard drive space. Hard drive size is typically measured in hundreds of Gigabytes or in Terabytes (1Tb = 1000Gb). Hard drives can usually store more information than RAM in the same way your bookshelf can store much more information than your brain's short term memory.

Matt

[bobbystahr]

@ Matt...wish I'd said that...then I'd be way smarter than I am, heh heh...great explanation which I'm passing on to a friend as it'll explain some stuff he's been quizzing me about as we plan a project he has so far only in his brain...hope this helps.

[Matt]

Thanks Bobby! I'm glad this is helpful. I often doubt whether I'm being helpful or just adding more confusion when I write this stuff.

[bobbystahr]

Thanks Bobby! I'm glad this is helpful. I often doubt whether I'm being helpful or just adding more confusion when I write this stuff.

Everything you write makes sense of something for me. Wish you had the time to do the manual or could clone your brain...heh heh...keep it coming...

[luvsmuzik]

Thanks Bobby! I'm glad this is helpful. I often doubt whether I'm being helpful or just adding more confusion when I write this stuff.

And thank you Matt, too!
That is probably the simplest explanation I have had yet. Spot on. When you like this program, you want to utilize it to full potential, using quality objects, atmospheres, and terrain, etc. All of which add to what has to be rendered. I used to not even know what a subdivision surface was....I do know what a polygon is...heh. (sort of)  For me it is always going to be a fight with the complexity and quality but I try to find a reasonable middle ground. Besides which I love those messages when you overdo it a little. ha

[bobbystahr]

Well here it is after 43:51:09 hours rendering. The water really clogged it up and I doubt I'll be rendering this again unless I figure out what made it take so long. Most of the time was spent on the water. Comments etc. welcome, I may re do this now that I have it labeled in a manner I can find it.

[bobbystahr]

I suspect I figured it out...I had 2 lakes competing with each other. Ive deleted thm and have gone to a Displaceable plane for the water and I killed the light in the lighthouse and the spotlights on the statues, the grotto/tower is supposed to be abandoned according to the story line in my head so they were over kill.Going much faster now though at a slightly smaller size so I may just do this again.

[Hannes]

Cool, Bobby, but I prefer the first one. It has some sort of an organic feeling. It looks like a real place.

@Matt, fantastic explanation!!!!!!!

[luvsmuzik]

However, that is one gorgeous render. Love the rocks and clouds and reflection especially.

I ran this through my Windows 10 editor. Lovely!

[bobbystahr]

Cool, Bobby, but I prefer the first one. It has some sort of an organic feeling. It looks like a real place.

@Matt, fantastic explanation!!!!!!!

Thanks. In many ways so do I Hannes and I'm tweaking back to that...for some brain-dead reason I forgot to turn off one of the lakes and that whacked the render time hugely. The veg in the first one was scaled up and in the current iteration is at scale 1 which in a 'real world' scale is appropriate but I may scale it up a bit more as I liked the hairy feel of the veg in the first one. Less of it and more hairy. But I'm keeping the lighthouse up high as that's where it would do the most good.I've replaced the lake with a plane and that's rendering faster as well.

[bobbystahr]

Well I tried a bunch of stuff and am sorta happy. Render time down to 4 hours which is 1/10th of the first full size render so that was nice.

[luvsmuzik]

Now you're cooking! Like the scale on vegetation aka hairy rocks.
Because I know your limitations, I am wondering about something. I know you did these renders at high detail and AA, which is great!
Maybe a wise one will answer this:
I see a film over both latest renders. I ran them through auto fix and got results below, which I prefer, but maybe I am wrong. Is this cloudiness caused by atmosphere, AA, gamma, enviro light or what? I get this in my renders too and attributed it to limitations of free version, but I see it here too.

Ha! I am old and nearsighted too.

[bobbystahr]

I see a film over both latest renders. I ran them through auto fix and got results below, which I prefer, but maybe I am wrong. Is this cloudiness caused by atmosphere, AA, gamma, enviro light or what? I get this in my renders too and attributed it to limitations of free version, but I see it here too.

Ha! I am old and nearsighted too.

That's Atmo bloom with haze set at 2, quite intentional and semi successful...dunno what causes yours if you didn't do what I did.

[Oshyan]

Yes, I am quite liking where it has come to. The lesson in all this, though, Bobby - and it's one you should really take to heart - is that there are usually reasons for extremely long renders, and they are often solvable. In many cases it simply doesn't make good sense to wait 10s of hours for a long render when you could cancel it early (seeing that progress is very slow after only a few hours) and resolve the problem. It is best to assume by default that if it *seems* slow (i.e. you make comments like "this new machine is not much faster than my old!"), then in fact something *is* wrong, and it probably can be fixed. So cancel the render and do some investigation.

I'm glad you were able to find a way to speed things up and come out with a great render in the end.

- Oshyan