Render Settings - More Settings

Started by rcallicotte, March 03, 2007, 06:12:40 PM

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rcallicotte

Under the More Settings tab in the Render Settings, what are -

1.  Detail blending
2.  Displacement filter

?
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

rcallicotte

So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Dark Fire

I still don't really know what most of the settings in T2TP are for. With the render settings I generally turn everything that I can on, and for the rest I put the sliders in their maximum position (except for the detail and GI, which I quickly realised were not designed to have ridiculously high values)...

rcallicotte

Well, one way to find out I guess would be for me to jack with these setting until I figure them out.
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Dark Fire

Perhaps you could do one of those topics where somebody renders a load of images showing the effects of different settings...

Oshyan

First, Dark Fire, I think your approach is a bit flawed. I can tell you - and perhaps this is an important one for a sticky somewhere - the *defaults* have been specifically designed to give you good results in average situations. Turning on additional quality options should seldom be necessary except in specific circumstances. Adjusting the base quality slider or AA is often useful, but beyond that you shouldn't generally need or want to mess with things like Ray-traced shadows, "reverse primary rays", etc. The defaults for detail and most render settings should be stuck to unless their function is clear.

The simple fact is that many of the render settings you see now would be considered "advanced" or potentially even not necessary for open access. In the final release you may see many of these settings removed because there simply is little or no value in allowing you to adjust them, and the potential for mistakes, resulting in longer render time or extremely odd results, is very high. It's often better to offer fewer options and good defaults than to offer a world of control but risk overwhelming and confusing people with unknown and hard to explain settings.

Calico, I'll explain these settings to the best of my knowledge, although Matt would need to answer to give full information.

Detail Blending seems to perform additional Antialiasing-type blending between micropolygons (individual rendered scene elements). At the default setting it produces good results in a reasonable time and is responsive to the detail slider. If you reduce it you'll get slightly more noisy output and I believe it's a bit faster. If you significantly increase it (say to 5) you get much longer render times but smoother results for an equivalent main Detail setting. Generally speaking increasing the Detail and/or AA settings would be the best way to increase detail without increasing render time too much. However in certain specific circumstances increased Detail Blending may be the answer to difficult render quality problems like high noise in complex lighting situations.

The Displacement Filter appears to be performing some kind of filtering on the displacement functions, the effect of which is not entirely clear. I would guess that it may be setting the "patch size" of displacement sampling on which displacements are calculated and blended. At larger values the displacement seems less rough, less precise and more prone to errors and overlap. This is a setting I would not recommend adjusting as the resulting output doesn't seem to be an improvement no matter what setting I tried. I'll have to ask Matt for some more info on this one.

- Oshyan

duff

Oshyan

Just out of interest, what is the reverse primary rays option intended for?

Oshyan

I honestly don't know what "Do reverse primary rays" is "intended for". It seems to kill all atmosphere rendering, except for a thin sliver from altitude. Kind of makes for a cool halo effect actually, so it might be useful. But as I indicated before there are a number of options in here that *don't* necessarily have a good purpose, either because changes to the renderer have made them obsolete, or because they were put in for troubleshooting purposes, etc. The bottom line is that the settings and functions have not been "cleaned up" yet.

Another example of this is the version numbers you see on many shaders - "Power Fractal Shader v3". This just indicates the internal versioning of that particular shader, but it's not likely something that we'll maintain in the name for the final release since it has no relevence to most users. Only those of us who remember v1 and v2 from previous private alphas would care to know at all, really. :D

- Oshyan

Sengin

Is there any difference between the "Do ray traced shadows" in the renderers options and the "enable ray traced shadows" in all of the atmosphere's settings (clouds, atmospheres)?  I've heard a lot about not wanting to use "do ray traced shadows" in the renderer options, but I don't know if it's only meant in that area, or in the atmosphere settings as well.

Oshyan

Yes. "Do raytraced shadows" in the main Renderer options controls shadow raytracing in general. You do *not* generally want to turn it off. When people are talking about not using "raytraced shadows", they are almost always referring to the options in Cloud or Atmosphere Quality tabs because they seldom have an effect on the rendered scene and they greatly increase render time. These raytraced shadow options are only useful when terrain is casting a shadow either onto clouds or into the atmosphere, respectively. I would leave them off in most cases unless you're sure you have a good reason to turn them on.

- Oshyan

rcallicotte

Thanks so much for explaining, Oshyan.  I don't need Matt to spend time on explaining the Displacement Filter, unless he thinks it's warranted.  Keep programming. LOL.  As far as your explanation of Detail Blending, this sounds like something that might have some use.  And then again, maybe not.  I'm still learning so many things, I'll leave that to the experts.

It'll be interesting to see which functions change or even disappear with the coming update.
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

ProjectX

I would rather not see these otpions disappear entirely, rather have the options for Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced GUIs (which basically enable and disable the sliders based on complexity). This way n00bs get decent results and render times, and the true masters of Terragen can tweak their renders to perfection.

rcallicotte

I would imagine that the node network will never go away, so the complexity will always be there for those who are no longer "noobs".  Anyway, it's in Planetside's best interests to allow as much creativity as possible, since oftentimes the best advertisement of a product like TG2 is its users.
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Dark Fire

Quote from: Oshyan on March 05, 2007, 04:00:01 PM
First, Dark Fire, I think your approach is a bit flawed.
Sorry, I got that approach from using TG 0.9, where there weren't so many settings to mess about with...