Help with clipping planes on render layers

Started by richa084, October 17, 2018, 10:42:34 AM

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richa084

Hello. I'd like to render only parts of a scene that fall between certain distances from the camera. I see that using Render Layers offers Near and Far clipping distances. However, when I set distances there, the entire scene is still rendered. I'm looking to split up my renders into two layers so I can composite external renders in between, so some of Terragen renders on top, and the rest renders behind. Can someone provide some guidance? Thanks!

WAS

I thought that the Render Layers (once you set a directory)  provides different stills (layers) of the scene, while still rendering the full scene?

https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Render_Layers_and_Render_Elements#Render_Elements

digitalguru

that's strange - I just tried it and it seems to just clip the atmosphere and not the terrain - that's a question for Matt

Matt

Welcome to the forum!

Clipping distances work on atmospheres, clouds and ray-traced objects. At the moment they don't work with the rasteriser, the render method used to render displaced surfaces such as terrain. However, you can make it work for everything by enabling "Ray trace everything" on the Advanced tab of the renderer. This tells Terragen to use the ray tracer for surfaces that would normally be rendered with the rasteriser. One of the drawbacks to this is that you need to click on the Subdiv Settings button and change "Ray detail multiplier" to 1, otherwise your terrain will be rendered at a lower detail level (larger micropolygons).

Usually "Ray trace everything" will take longer to render (highly dependent on Anti-aliasing levels), but in some scenes it can work out to be quicker, especially in more recent Terragen builds.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

digitalguru

I guess when using path tracing then everything can be clipped by default?

Matt

Yes. When using path tracing it automatically uses RTE.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.