thank you, xpleet, for this example. It clearly shows that you are right in that vue7 clouds have stepped up to TG2.
There is some grain in the clouds, maybe this can be helped by increasing a qualiy parameter of some sort. However, this being rendered in just a few minutes is a benchmark to aim for in TG2.
I would assume the reason for being so much faster in not necessarily in "better code", but most probably in a different render strategy that takes quite a few shortcuts, is maybe less accurate than TG2, and so on, but eventually delivers much higher render speeds while still looking nice.
I wish there will be a few setting in TG2 that will allow the renderer to take some of those shortcuts in the atmosphere and clouds, too. User configurable, wold be my vote. For example, when you want beams of light from e.g. trees casting shadows onto some fog, you need a crazy amount of samples to not get grain in the render. I would like to have a "beams" shader of some sort that creates hose sunbeams without relying on the sampling method.
Vue7 must clearly use some shortcuts like these in their renderer. This is a "dangerous" venture, though. At least in the past, those simplifications have led to less realistic renders with Vue, I believe.
Frank
