To abort or not to abort

[kevnar]

I started a full render before going to bed last night. When I woke up this morning it looked to be about a third done. Trouble is, it looks all stippled, sort of like it was painted by an impressionist painter. Is this just part of the rendering process, or did I screw up an setting somewhere? I don't want to wait another 20 hours to find out. 

[neuspadrin]

is that the render after gi pass, or what it looks like during gi pass (with a super high detail/gi level etc).

Because with high values of those the gi dots are very close and sometimes look like a painting so to speak.

however, and more likely, otherwise it looks like your atmosphere/clouds dont have enough samples.

[cyphyr]

Agree with neuspadrin
Check what your detail level is, it shouldn't ever need to go above 1 and mostly a setting of 0.8 will be just fine.
Richard

[kevnar]

I set the GI sliders all the way up. I wasn't sure what they do, but I was going for maximum quality. Maybe I over-did it.

I didn't adjust anything with the cloud samples. Should I have?

[neuspadrin]

a definate yes.  atmosphere and cloud samples from details in their own should also be upped before a final render

[cyphyr]

Set your GI sliders to 1 or 2, that should be sufficient, also check your cloud samples, rarely should you need to go above 512, usually 256 is enough and the atmosphere needn't go above 64 (16 will produce noise!)
richard

[kevnar]

Alright. I'm gonna abort and restart with the new settings.

But could someone gimmie a quick run-down on what the GI sliders do? For future reference.

[kevnar]

Restarted with the recommended settings. Thanks, guys.

I'll post the final in a couple of days (or however long it takes to finish). Wish me luck.

[neuspadrin]

Here's a good post with links to various other posts covering GI and the settings.

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5452.0

[Mohawk20]

Basically, GI makes the light in your scene more realistic, by making the shadows not pitch-black...

[cyphyr]

On an allied topic, can someone confirm that a higher GI blur radius will effectively negate higher GI Sample Quality and/or GI Relative Detail?
Thanks
richard

[rcallicotte]

@cyphyr - I can only confirm that upping the GI Blur Radius helps with jitter when doing animations.

[kevnar]

Well, here it is. My first real render in TG2. It took about 4 hours to build and 18 hours to render. It's based on Seth's Wilderness tutorial, with a few tweaks here and there.

Any pointers on making it look more real and less CG?

[Mohawk20]

Scale!
Either increase the size of the trees, or decrease the size of the stones.

Or you could decrease the amount of big boulders and add a small scale displacement on the boulders...

[neuspadrin]

i agree with mohawk.  some displacement on the boulders would help them feel realistic and not smooth, also too many big boulders are unrealistic as he said.  1-3 really big ones might feel better surrounded by smaller ones, or just decrease size on all of them.