Leaving forums, end of resource thread

[edlo]

@duff...yeah...I was proud of those 64mb back then...LOL!!!   Staying away from water?....what no guts...or just no time?
@fmtoffolo....hate to keep beating a dead horse here...of course TG2TP renders will take more time because of its advanced features.  The question is...at what point does the quality of the end result render justify the increased render wait time?
Do you feel it's reasonable to wait 70hrs for an 800X600 TG2TP render?  Are you getting that much better an end result than what you could have gotten out of a 2hr 800X600 TG 0.9XX render? 
Is the extra wait worth it to you?....if your answer is yes, then TG2TP is for you.
That's really the decision everyone has to make for themselves.....

I encountered a 70 hour render once and I canceled the thing; of course its not reasonable ...but high render times are the result of people trying to ram into a scene several hundred thousand populations, complicated displacements, and to top everything out one or two volumetric layers and then render at .8 .9 or even 1 quality settings; slip that into any of the best render engines available (if it was possible) and it will choke.
I have rendered several pieces ranging from 2000 pix to 3000 pix at no more than .45 .47 quality and the results are great besides never going over 20 hours of render time.

[Oshyan]

Edlo, I'm glad to hear you've had success rendering at fairly high resolutions. Although I don't think your results are necessarily representative, and some people do prefer the quality increase of say 0.75 detail or even 1.0, I do certainly agree that many people are attempting very challenging scenes or simply cranking up detail settings without knowing really what their affect may be. It's easy to understand how one might get frustrated in these cases. Due to TG2's much more complex system it is a necessity that there be more detail adjustments, but this comes with an increased need for understanding of those settings as well. It's regretable that there is no good Renderer settings reference at this time (it is forthcoming), but I think it's fair to say that the defaults are a very good starting point and one should not simply crank all settings up and assume you'll get the best results. This was true with TG 0.9 as well, but is even more so with TG2.

With careful and judicious use of appropriate detail settings I think you can already get reasonable (although not outstanding) render times on even moderately complex scenes. Highly complex scenes and "outstanding" render times will have to wait for the significant optimization due later this year.

- Oshyan

[nikita]

Is the extra wait worth it to you?....if your answer is yes, then TG2TP is for you.
That's really the decision everyone has to make for themselves.....

I think that pretty much sums it up.
I render scenes at quality 1 too and put thing into the scene without caring much for render times. (which doesn't mean i use GI of 3 or 4, or some insane numer of samples) But I know it's worth it. And if it isn't, then I didn't make enough preview renders before to check the details are all ok.

[Oshyan]

Extensive use of the Crop Render function can help a lot in fine-tuning detail settings. Knowing what parts of the scene are likely to be a detail concern, and potentially rendering them separately at higher detail and compositing later, can also help. For example you might find in a scene with heavy rays that 64 atmosphere samples gives you good quality for 90% of the sky, but the small area around the sun is still noisy. Turning up to 128 or even 256 samples will solve it, but doing this for the whole sky is unnecessary and wasteful. Hopefully in the future we'll be able to do selective detail/sample maps as well...

- Oshyan

[rcallicotte]

I never even thought about using Crop Renders to save for later to add into the whole finished picture.  Sheeeeit.

[Will]

Hmm well I go away (well play neverwinter nights 2) for two days and look what going on. I agree the it is buggy so far and the render times are realy really long but that the fun part for me, the sence of adventure and being on the bleeding egde of a new program (or at least as bleeding as I can be without be an alpha tester) but I'm glad to see you'll give it anouther chance when the final release comes thoguh.

Regards,

Will

[gradient]

@edlo....you said "but high render times are the result of people trying to ram into a scene several hundred thousand populations, complicated displacements, and to top everything out one or two volumetric layers and then render at .8 .9 or even 1 quality settings"

Absolutely not true in my case....take a look at my thread on water render times ( with link to final image)....NO objects, NO clouds....mostly water....yes quality at 1, GI @ 1.....

The subject of render times has been beaten to death...so, as I said before...if you're happy with it, then fine.

Anyway, glad you are having success with quality settings of 0.45....I suspect most folks would not be happy with that level of quality...

[Oshyan]

Water is particularly problematic right now in terms of render time. Certainly if you have a scene largely composed of water you're going to see very high render times. But then the same was true of TG 0.9, and I can remember more than few renders turning out to be 30+ hour monsters on 0.9 even with decent computer hardware. Fortunately you can take comfort in the fact that reflection and general water rendering time will come down. How much remains to be seen of course. But just because water rendering takes a long time right now doesn't mean overall rendering time is unusably slow.

- Oshyan

[gradient]

" I can remember more than few renders turning out to be 30+ hour monsters on 0.9 even with decent computer hardware."

Yeah...but not for an 800X600 render.....

And, yes I know you can't compare 800x600 renders across the two versions....

I'll keep quiet now....sorry for taking this thread sideways....

[Dark Fire]

It only used to take me about 30 minutes per frame for top-quality HD resolution renders featuring a lot of water in TG 0.9...

[RedSquare]

30 mins for a top quality render!  Well that shows how lousy I am, my longest render took....

Original render 5600x4180 @ 236 hrs:15mins

Oh! 0.9.43  WM1.25 Can't understand why so many pls moaning.    Mind you not feasible commercially speaking.

[edlo]

@edlo....you said "but high render times are the result of people trying to ram into a scene several hundred thousand populations, complicated displacements, and to top everything out one or two volumetric layers and then render at .8 .9 or even 1 quality settings"

Absolutely not true in my case....take a look at my thread on water render times ( with link to final image)....NO objects, NO clouds....mostly water....yes quality at 1, GI @ 1.....

The subject of render times has been beaten to death...so, as I said before...if you're happy with it, then fine.

Anyway, glad you are having success with quality settings of 0.45....I suspect most folks would not be happy with that level of quality...

Of course I am happy with .45 settings and if you continue to set 1 quality and 1 GI you will continue to get insanely high render times; and yes water its quite slow at the moment but here http://ic3.deviantart.com/fs15/f/2007/024/8/6/promontorium_by_edlo.jpg there is a lot of water there, some volumetric clouds and quite a huge pine tree population; took 15 hours to render at .43 quality, if you object to the quality of that piece then there is no way any render setting will satisfy you, or any of the folks that aren't satisfied with "lesser" settings.
As Oshyan puts it, you don't need to crank it all the way up to get great results not in TG2 and not in TG 0.9
Of course if people are trying to push the quality of a 800pix render cause of the unregistered limitations, so I am only stating what results I have on higher 2000-3000 pix and up on a registered version; so pixel count may well be the difference here.

[edlo]

Edlo, I'm glad to hear you've had success rendering at fairly high resolutions. Although I don't think your results are necessarily representative, and some people do prefer the quality increase of say 0.75 detail or even 1.0, I do certainly agree that many people are attempting very challenging scenes or simply cranking up detail settings without knowing really what their affect may be. It's easy to understand how one might get frustrated in these cases. Due to TG2's much more complex system it is a necessity that there be more detail adjustments, but this comes with an increased need for understanding of those settings as well. It's regretable that there is no good Renderer settings reference at this time (it is forthcoming), but I think it's fair to say that the defaults are a very good starting point and one should not simply crank all settings up and assume you'll get the best results. This was true with TG 0.9 as well, but is even more so with TG2.

With careful and judicious use of appropriate detail settings I think you can already get reasonable (although not outstanding) render times on even moderately complex scenes. Highly complex scenes and "outstanding" render times will have to wait for the significant optimization due later this year.

- Oshyan

We agree on all counts
Please drop by my stuff so you can see why I am happy with the results these quality settings are delivering for me http://edlo.deviantart.com/gallery/

[gradient]

@edlo....
From your own words on your deviantart site....

"Well the clouds are rendered directly on Terragen2 tech preview, amazing volumetric engine it has, unfortunately too dam slow still"

BTW...you have some very nice work up there...congrats and respect!

[RedSquare]

edlo -

promontorium

Oh my, I realy like this render. Can't fault the quality. Excellent atmo, surfaces(shaders)and the population fits nicely.  Out of curiosity, was your population masked or the result of slope, coverage and/or altitude settings?   Second question, was the bird postworked or TG2'd?  Thanks for sharing.

I also stopped by and became absorbed in your work, also my congrat's and much respect. Thanks  gradient for the heads up well worth the visit.  Oh to be able to PW like that.