first posted image with a few questions

[iu34]

Hi, I'm new on the forums, but I've been using TG 0.9 & 2 for a while. Attached is my latest render with TG2 beta (free version). I'm just wondering, why is there noise?
render settings:
   render:
   detail 0.6, AA 3, GI(or is that an l?) relative detail: 3, sample quality: 4, blur radius: 8. Narrow cubic pixel filter,ray traced shadows enabled.
   Atmosphere samples: 32, ray traced shadows enabled.

With these settings, rendering took well over an hour for this 640x480 pic. Does anyone know why there's still noise?

[Tangled-Universe]

The image doesn't look that noisy to me, but from the noise I'm seeing you would have to increase the atmo samples further.
I'd say test with increments of 16 (that's what I always do). Guessing from this scene 64 will be fine and 80 will be almost entirely "clean".

If you see noise in your clouds then you might also increase the cloud samples. To avoid mis-understanding with samples it's better to talk about quality level, since the amount of samples relates heavily to your cloud(fractal)parameters.
In the majority of scenes/cases a cloudquality of 0.8 will suffice. If not, increase by ~0.1 increments.

I also saw you have raytraced shadows enabled in your atmosphere.
You *only* need raytraced shadows in your atmosphere when you want to cast shadows into your atmosphere.
For clouds you *only* need raytraced shadows when terrain casts shadows on them.

If you stick to these rules of thumb you will save a lot of rendertime. I bet changing this setting will cut rendertime by about a third or so. You can then use this rendertime for some populations etc

If you have more questions, feel free to ask.

Martin

[Tangled-Universe]

The image doesn't look that noisy to me, but from the noise I'm seeing you would have to increase the atmo samples further.
I'd say test with increments of 16 (that's what I always do). Guessing from this scene 64 will be fine and 80 will be almost entirely "clean".

If you see noise in your clouds then you might also increase the cloud samples. To avoid mis-understanding with samples it's better to talk about quality level, since the amount of samples relates heavily to your cloud(fractal)parameters.
In the majority of scenes/cases a cloudquality of 0.8 will suffice. If not, increase by ~0.1 increments.

I also saw you have raytraced shadows enabled in your atmosphere.
You *only* need raytraced shadows in your atmosphere when you want to cast shadows into your atmosphere.
For clouds you *only* need raytraced shadows when terrain casts shadows on them.

If you stick to these rules of thumb you will save a lot of rendertime. I bet changing this setting will cut rendertime by about a third or so. You can then use this rendertime for some populations etc

If you have more questions, feel free to ask.

Martin

[iu34]

Thanks! I did a quick render with a different scene disabling ray traced shadows and increasing atmosphere samples to 64, and it looks like all the noise is gone! I'll post different pics later.

[Oshyan]

Your GI settings also seem unnecessarily high. The default of 2/2 should be fine in most cases. If you choose to increase it, you should test the difference in crop areas to see if it actually improves the scene. Otherwise it is not really worth the render time.

- Oshyan