Performance

[nxfxcom]

Hello,

i have been working with Maya for about 3 years, and started last week playing with Terragen2, i am a little bit concerned with the Rendering Performance, a simple setup from the basic tutorial takes about 3 Minutes to render, and my viewport looks horrible, i am using a 2008 Mac Pro with dual 3GHZ the nvidia GTX 285 plus GT120, 4 SSD drives and 24 GB of ram, and it still takes about 3 minutes to render the file in 640x480 (just followed the simple tut)

Any idea why it is so slow?

Thank you

[FrankB]

can you specify the tutorial you mean? there are a lot of basic tutorials, so...

Anyway, rendertime is dependant on may things. There are many switches that deal with a certain quality aspect, that usually does not need to be turned on. For example, "ray traced shadows" in the cloud node. Only needed if e.g. a mountain summit is casting a shadow on the cloud layer.
But also: render detail, have you pushed it all the way up to 1, or even beyond? Do you need this level of detail for your scene? Mabye you don't. Are you pushing GI relative quality through the roof? Usually you won't need more than 2. Even 1 will be sufficient for many scenes.

I could go on like that. It's would be best if you could attach your tgd to your post, so others can have a look and better help you optimize it.

Cheers,
Frank

[old_blaggard]

A couple of other things to note:
- The viewport isn't completely OpenGL-based like Maya - it's basically a low-rez rendering of the scene that you can navigate through dynamically. It's also not multithreaded right now, so you only have one core working on it.
- There is a bug in Mac OS X 10.5 that results in threading not quite working properly, so performance doesn't scale well beyond two cores in a final render. If you're using all of your cores to render, you're actually running more slowly than with just 2. Mac OS X 10.6 fixes this.
- Keep in mind that Terragen is doing a whole lot of calculations of micropolygons, lighting, and textures. In my experience working with a Maya/Slim/Renderman pipeline, TG2 is actually pretty competitive speed-wise when comparing similar scene complexities.

[Henry Blewer]

I've done images with several hundred thousand objects (trees). Terragen 2 is really quite fast, 800 x 480, 0.95 detail, in 10 hours or so.

[ndeewolfwood]

yes, Terragen is very very very slow for any kind of scene.
BUT  you can render some scene who are just imposible to render under maya without memory problem (even in 64 bits system).
Try to render a scene in maya with 20 000 trees....it's almost impossible without many memory crashing problem....you can do that in terragen.

It's remind me, a Seth post on the CG society forum.
All the guys comments says that they don't understand why is so long to render...
OK they're right the render time is too long compare to other package  for the same quality result....but what they forget or don't understand is that is complety procedural and chaos friendly .
push one button a you have a fresh new scene.
you can move  the camera 3000 km away, and make a render again with the same quality result but with a completely different scene.....i think that terragen is the only soft to do that with this render quality...

My point of view about terragen : learn today to be ready to use it on futur super fast computer...


IN PROCEDURAL I TRUST !!!!!

[nxfxcom]

Thank you for all your feedback, i am using Snow Leopard, that might be part of the reason, even having trouble saving files.

Thank you

[jo]

Hi,

Thank you for all your feedback, i am using Snow Leopard, that might be part of the reason, even having trouble saving files.

You may have trouble saving project files to hard drives other than the boot drive (the one the OS is on) with TG2 Mac. This is fixed for the next release. In the meantime the workaround is to save files to the boot drive. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards,

Jo

[nxfxcom]

Just bougth the full version and still waiting on license (hint ) i hoped that might help, but ok, my boot drive it is for now

Thanks

[jo]

Hi,

In addition to what old_blaggard has said I would also refer you to my post here:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7373.0

I believe your Mac Pro is a dual quad core one. That means TG2 by default will use 8 threads when rendering. You may find that limiting it to 4 is quicker. There are two ways you can try this. The first is to change the Maximum threads parameter in the Advanced tab of the Render node settings to 4. The other way is to do it via the preferences:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2798

It's worth experimenting a bit. 4 might be faster, 6 might be faster or perhaps 8 is actually the fastest. I see you are using Snow Leopard so, as I mention in the first link, it should be a bit faster than on 10.5. It will probably depend on the scene.

I agree with Frank, if you can post a project (.tgd) file we can look at we might be able to see how it can be made to render faster.

Regards,

Jo

[FrankB]

Thank you for all your feedback, i am using Snow Leopard, that might be part of the reason, even having trouble saving files.

Thank you

and also post that tgd file here, or send it through PM. I have a single core i7 that runs under vista, and can make use of 8 threads very effectively. I could compare render time, so we can better see if it's a scaling problem on your dual cpu mac.

Frank