Does anyone want to help me?

[fenixcats]

Hi To All, I have been away for some time but just got back into being addicted again :-)

I have made progress and have come across a problem and for the last 4 days, I have been trying my best to figure out my problem (tutorials, others questions, etc.) without any help so here goes - I have produced a really nice scene and when I render, even after 24 hours, I only get 1/2 the picture (the top 1/2 only with lots of little dots on the bottom 1/2).

I included my TGD file as well as my TER file for anyone to try. In my preview window, it looks really good and for the top 1/2 of my complete render, its a winner if I only could render the whole picture.

Before anyone asks, my PC is quite new and has produced other renders without so much as 1 problem, but only this one is problematic! I will include one render as an example of what I have done...

Thnaks in advance,

Mike Nudell
fenixcats

Glad to be back...

[FrankB]

looks like you have reduced the jitter in the atmosphere quality tab quite a lot. True?

[fenixcats]

I checked my atmosphere settings and on each layer, its shows a "1" for jitter, is this wrong?

[Hetzen]

I've found massive performance issues when the render hits water, and would guess this has to do with the reflections having to re render the displacements and populations etc, through the ray trace. I don't have a TG machine in front of me to help or offer any other help. If it's any consolation, I really like the abstract shapes you've got in your scene, looks very cool graphic.

[Oshyan]

Well, nothing is really jumping out at me as far as what might be hanging the render, but you do have some demanding elements, and some odd settings.

You have 5 cloud layers, which will definitely slow things down, but all of them are at low sample levels, which should give you decent render time, but low quality. You have most of them set to Optimal (default) acceleration cache, but one of them is set to "Aggressive", which is not advisable, and one of them is set to "none" which is usually not necessary (although in rare cases it gets rid of certain artifacts). You have also enabled Raytraced Shadows in one of your cloud layers, which is unnecessary unless you have terrain that will be casting shadows *onto* your clouds (which would require very low clouds).

Your render detail of 1 is probably also more than you need, especially with such low cloud samples. I'd recommend trying 0.7 or so.

To be honest it seems as if settings have been chosen somewhat at random, perhaps to see what they do, but you should always be careful with such experimentation, changing one setting at a time and setting it back if it doesn't do anything, or does something you don't want. You can also always ask for help on settings, of course.

I can try your render myself tomorrow with some settings adjusted as per my comments above. Let me know if you'd like me to do so. Or you can continue experimenting yourself, with the above feedback in mind.

- Oshyan

[Vulthoom]

To be honest it seems as if settings have been chosen somewhat at random, perhaps to see what they do,

- Oshyan

Without a proper manual how can it be otherwise?
Suck it and see is all that we who are not in the know have.

[Tangled-Universe]

To be honest it seems as if settings have been chosen somewhat at random, perhaps to see what they do,

- Oshyan

Without a proper manual how can it be otherwise?
Suck it and see is all that we who are not in the know have.

Having 5 different cloudlayers with each different settings just doesn't make sense because afterwards you won't be able to distinguish individual layers to examine the quality. A better approach is one single layer and make different renders with different settings and change one setting each time.
Pretty time-consuming though, but manual or not, with *very* little effort you can find numerous posts here dealing with render-settings.

Martin

[fenixcats]

Thank You to everyone's suggestions - I thought it might have something to do with the atmospheres as I have fog just above the water as well as a ferw layers of clouds at different heigths and I am playing to see what results I can achieve.

As for right now, I decided to remove ALL atmospheres and render, then I will add one at a time until I get a better "feel" of what the heck I am doing...

[Vulthoom]

Pretty time-consuming though, but manual or not, with *very* little effort you can find numerous posts here dealing with render-settings.

Martin

The Planetside fora are indeed filled with useful information and very helpful people but, to suggest that trawling through tens of thousands of posts is an acceptable substitute for a manual on a paid-for product is ridiculous.

From the forum posts, Planetside's future updates for Terragen2 seem to be minor tweaks and upgrades for the relatively small pool of very talented TG2 artists on here who already know what they are doing and have already, presumably, paid for the product. Planetside is a business and surely giving priority to the basic documentation would encourage NEW potential purchasers to part with the cash. More paying customers, more dosh for Planetside, more  staff, more development - surely this can only be good for all of us.....?

/End rant   

[fenixcats]

Hi All

WEell, I deleted all atmospheres and just tried rendering the terrain, and as of now, its been running 24 hours and STILL only have the top 1/2 of my landscape - so either I found a glitch or something else is going on that I can not identify.

My ter file is from the older version of TG and the landscape rendered fine using that so if anyone likes to troubleshoot, use my files listed on opriginal post, remove all the atmospheres and try rendering. If you can make it work, please come back and post but until then, I am moving on to other projects I want to try.

Thanks again everyone.....

[neuspadrin]

From the forum posts, Planetside's future updates for Terragen2 seem to be minor tweaks and upgrades for the relatively small pool of very talented TG2 artists on here who already know what they are doing and have already, presumably, paid for the product.

Most development they have been doing have been small bug fixes (1.2.1 to 1.3.1), and they have been working hard to document every node type and get the user documentation out.  They also have released a "Your first scene" pdf to help a little, but to get some really good documentation completed + node network, it will take awhile.

[Tangled-Universe]

The Planetside fora are indeed filled with useful information and very helpful people but, to suggest that trawling through tens of thousands of posts is an acceptable substitute for a manual on a paid-for product is ridiculous.

Believe me, it's NOT thrawling through thousands of posts, saying that proves for me you didn't even try really or you just didn't use the proper search parameters.
At the moment there isn't a manual, so yes, it's the best substitute now. Not ridiculous at all :S Responding to helpful people like this doesn't really work.
Just to get you started: http://www.terragen.org/index.php?topic=3386.0

[Oshyan]

I should really post that Terragen.org thread over here as a sticky.

As I've said, documentation is forthcoming soon. Right now the My First Scene doc is available, next will come an interface guide, then the in-depth sections on terrain, shaders, etc. The Node Reference will also be significantly fleshed out. These things should happen over the next few weeks.

Fenixcats, I'm currently rendering your scene, I'm at 3 hours and 22 minutes on a quad core system, and it's still going. I even left all the cloud layers in. It's slowed down a lot in the middle section, but I think the thing is you've used some really odd, extreme displacements, and it's presenting challenges for the render. If your system is a bit older I could easily see it taking quite a long time and appearing to be hung. I'll let you know if it does finish, and share the image with you, but I recommend getting your displacements a bit more controlled for future versions of this or other scenes.

- Oshyan

[fenixcats]

Thank You Oshyan - well, the next step for me was to remove everything except my terrain file and try rendering that, using the POV in my file. This terrain was created in TG 0.9 so thought TG2 should handle it BUT I am at +24 hours and still chokes 1/2 way down my render, so I figure it has to do with the TER file for some reason.

I opened it back up in older version and rendered it and it worked quite well, so don't know what's happeningh at this point.

I appreciate you trying and if you do end up with a finsihed render, I would love to get it 

Once again, thanks!

[Oshyan]

Sorry for the delay on this one. I was able to figure out the problem - it was your Lake object. I didn't narrow it down to what exactly was the specific setting that caused the issue, but disabling the lake made it render fine. Putting in a new lake with default settings also worked fine.

I upped the quality of the clouds and turned off unnecessary settings and it rendered in about 2.5 hours on a quad core. I've attached the render in case you want to see it. This includes all cloud layers. Note that you have fairly fine and extreme displacement which makes the surfaces look "fuzzy".

- Oshyan