New user question

[TomD]

Hello,

I'm a new Terragen user. I had some colleagues in the past who used it to create fantastic vistas, and I wanted to give it a shot too! So far I have been able to render some good skies to be used in an upcoming video game, and I look forward to polish my skills with the software. One of the questions I have is about rendering time. I'm using the very last Frontier build, and the pathtracing preview is blazing fast compared to the actual render. Is there something in the pipeline to bring those performances to the renderer itself? Right now when I need to render a draft, I simply decrease the render resolution, poly detail & sampling, but it still takes around 30 minutes to an hour to render a 2048*1024 sky, while I get something really cool a matter of minutes with the pathtracing preview.

Keep up the awesome work and let me know if you have advice for me

[Oshyan]

The Ray Traced Preview uses several significant short cuts, i.e. approximations or reductions in detail, which are not suitable for final renders. For an equivalent level of quality the RTP should not be faster than a final render. If it is, then there is probably room for optimization in your render settings, which we are happy to help with. We've provided some relevant recommendations already, in the documentation here for example: http://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Rendering_Optimization_Guide (work in progress) as well as the Support Diaries entry here: https://planetside.co.uk/blog/scene-optimization-example-1/
For further, more specific recommendations it would be best if we could look at an example TGD, which you can share here as an attachment or email to support AT planetside.co.uk if you prefer to keep it private.

- Oshyan

[TomD]

Thanks for the links, there are some interesting information that I wasn't aware of. I'll send a TGD to the support to get some extra help, as this has to be private for now. I feel like my rendering settings are quite low, but the rendering time stays quite high compared to the preview. I think it may be related to clouds quality settings, but I'm still very new to this, so any help is welcome