Quote from: Mohawk20 on May 28, 2009, 02:57:17 PM
Quote from: RArcher on May 28, 2009, 12:27:42 PM
I would say that if you are getting noise at a detail level of 1 and are thinking of rendering at even higher detail levels, then there is a problem somewhere else. Perhaps AA, or changing the filter used would make more of a difference.
Right, AA is at 3 at the moment...
I received an email about the new TG2Xfrog bundles, and your image was featured: http://www.planetside.co.uk/gallery/f/tg2/mountain_lake_storm_arriving.jpg.html
I'd like to achieve a similar result. Can you give any insight in what you did to get it that crisp?
Well, I'm not Ryan of course, but I have a decent idea how he did it and how I do it and it is fairly simple. I'm pretty sure you already know it yourself.
Mainly, his quality settings are just high, simply put. First to get detail and crispiness you'll need a resolution which supports this. So anything starting from around 1000px is fine.
A crisp render needs a clean atmo with just enough samples, but also the "trick" is to have a right balance between renderquality and AA.
Too much AA will make everything too smooth, too less will make it too rough (like yours). Very high detail settings are ok, but you can easily blur those details out with high AA or bad postwork.
I also have the impression your models aren't set at high or highest detail level? Or is it the quality of the render?
For this image I'd start with rendering at ~0.85 and AA ~8 and slowly increase it. Atmospheresamples from 48 will mostly suffice, but I find 64 a nice trade-off in quality and speed.
Another important aspect is the lighting. Ryan's example shows some dramatic lighting in terms of shadows and contrasts. There's a lot going on, so to say. Many shadows, low sun-angle(!), clean shadows (GI-settings, atmo-samples) etc.
Lighting makes or breaks an image in my opinion and is something I spend much time on in each image.
The POV and setup of this scene simply doesn't offer much possibilites to play with the light.
Martin