Grainy light shafts in atmosphere?

Started by commorancy, August 03, 2009, 03:27:32 AM

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commorancy

Since the release of the final beta and, subsequently, the final release of TG2, I have noticed that certain sunlight rays produce very grainy shafts of light no matter what quality level I set on the atmosphere or the clouds.  In previous releases, it seemed I was able to tweak out most of grain by raising the atmosphere quality value to at least 100.  Now, I can't seem to get rid of the atmospheric grain on even 256 quality.  Did something change in this final two releases that would have affected this?  Here is a link to my sample image on Flickr:


Click the image to see the full sized image.

I'm trying to figure out if it's the atmosphere quality setting or the cloud quality setting that's modifying this grain. I have increased the quality settings on pretty much everything to the maximum slider settings (and gone above that in some instances) for each object.  Yet, still no major change. I'd really like the upper shafts of light to be much less grainy than this.

Here are my render settings:

Detail 1, AA 3, GI Detail 3, GI Samples 3, GI Blur 8

The reason I have hesitated turning up the GI settings is that for each whole number value up, it seems to raise the render time by at least a factor of 2.  So, I'd prefer this to not become a 5-7 day render even on my Core i7 (recently upgraded).  I have tried this with both ray-traced and non RT shadows and still the grain persists. Note that when I turned on traced shadows, the render time went from about 2 hours to over 20 hours.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

--
Brian Wright

Matt

#1
Have you tested the same file in an older version?

The setting that will have the most affect on this is the atmosphere samples. Everything else can be left as it is, or even reduced.

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

commorancy

Quote from: Matt on August 03, 2009, 05:39:14 AM
Have you tested the same file in an older version?

The setting that will have the most affect on this is the atmosphere samples. Everything else can be left as it is, or even reduced.

Matt


Matt,

As far as running it in the older versions.. I'm not sure when a change may have happened.  I'm making the assumption that it was sometime in the last two versions.  But, I'm not exactly sure how far back in versions I'd need to go to see if there has been a change.  The next thing is, I don't have that many versions back that I can test.  So, I can only test the render on all the versions I have.

I seem to recall that I used to be able to put the atmosphere quality on max, and the grain went away almost entirely.  Now when I do this in the latest versions, I don't seem to get quite the same results.  I will have to run some tests on the versions I have installed to see if I can reduce the grain.  I may have some even older TG2 TP versions somwhere, but I'll have to see if I can dig them up.  Of course, the oldest versions may not want to load this TGD file as it may contain parameters not in that version.

Thanks.

--
Brian