Render order

[Mohawk20]

I just started my first serious attempt at a canyon, and I noticed something rather disappointing.

The render order is background to foreground in this scene, while the foreground is a solid wall that covers it all.

Below a mid-render screenshot, that shows everything you won't see when the render is finished. Below that an earlier render that has finished from the same POV to show the result.

My question is: why this order, and can it be fixed (or will it be fixed, or is it fixed already in an upcoming update)?

[Oshyan]

The actual render order is probably no different, it's just that in many other cases the occlusion culling works more effectively so distant terrain that is covered up by closer terrain is determined early on and not rendered. Sometimes when you have a large displacement in the foreground it will not be computed immediately and thus distant terrain will be rendered that does not need to be. It is difficult to pre-process everything and provide better occlusion culling accuracy since all displacement is computed at render time, and pre-processing the entire scene might cause memory or render time issues. Nonetheless it's a problem that we'll be working on over time and hopefully in the future more efficient methods can be found to avoid rendering things that won't show in the final render.

- Oshyan

[Walli]

is there a rule of thumb, when displacements might be to large for "effective" occlusion culling?

[Oshyan]

Nothing official that I know of, but I would say that anything that crosses a render tile boundary is a candidate for concern in this regard. Of course that would mean many displacements are like that, and also that it depends on render detail and resolution. You've probably noticed TG2 renders the same scene differently at different resolution, etc.

Hopefully this stuff can be improved in the future.

- Oshyan