HELP! 200 hours of render and I lost the image...

[jritchie777]

After 200 hours of rendering I lost the scene due to a glitch in my graphic driver - the monitor would not display - had to power of my unit to get back the display.  Not the fault of T2, but I am at my wits end with render times. 

I've attached the cave scene I was making, could some of you experts out there tell me where I am going wrong with these ridiculously long renders.  I could understand if I was animating, but this is just a single scene.  I know the obvious, my plane that I used for the roof of the cave is way to big, but this was an experiment, and too detailed with objects and fractal structures so I expected this to take a while, but when the roof was done (it rendered from top to bottom), and it began rendering the regular landscape, it still took another 100 hours.

Is my system just too underpowered?  Here are the specs:
  2.70 gigahertz AMD Athlon II X2 215
  3072 Megabytes Installed Memory
  NVIDIA GeForce 210 [Display adapter]
  HP 2509 [Monitor]

Any and all help is appreciated!
JR

[PG]

For me it seemed to be the displacement of the plane. I think it's a bit too heavy for TG2 to handle efficiently. Maybe change the size of the plane to 9000x9000 or possibly smaller and then using a flat plane to simulate the shadows that would be removed.


EDIT: Sorry, just realised you were on about the bottom part of the render, re-rendering the bottom crop. 2 secs.

EDIT x2: the water seems to have a big impact on the speed but the plane still seems to be the element that's causing the biggest problems. I rendered a crop that completely avoided the plane, turned off the clouds, lake, fern and the needle population and it was just as slow as when rendering the crop normally. Disabling the shadows that are cast by the plane improved the speed a quite a bit but still slow.

[leafspring]

You should definitely increase the subdiv cache. I'm doing a testrender of the bottom half right now and TG2 is using more than 400 MB per thread and I guess it would go way higher but I've limited the maximum to 3.2 GB. So with your dual core I'd say try 3 GB as the subdiv cache size. Although this won't help you with the extreme plane, it'll definitely decrease the render times.

[jritchie777]

I will adjust the subdiv cache, thanks.  That is exactly the type of input I need, help with my settings.

As for the plane, I already know it is too big and will address that in the future with much smaller planes more strategically placed.  But I still need to improve render times.  Also going to try using TRAM, so I can still use my system during renders.
JR

[jritchie777]

 

You should definitely increase the subdiv cache.

Thanks Rimmon, that has helped a lot.

I've also started using TRaM 2 - Wonderful application!  It is listed on the Classic Terragen Resources page, but it works for T2 as well (Deep Edition).

http://www.terraproject.de/tram/