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General => Image Sharing => Topic started by: Ethrieltd on March 16, 2017, 06:44:36 PM

Title: Atmospheric Ice Halo
Post by: Ethrieltd on March 16, 2017, 06:44:36 PM
Terragen doesn't do halos or sundogs... So....

Halosim...

Setting for Hexagonal ice prism with a horizontal column of .1deg displacement and tophat dispersion using 52million rays. I replicated the sun setting from Terragen with a 3deg elevation and an azimuth compensation of 8deg/altitude compensation of -2deg, the sun angular diameter of .5 and resulted in a render time of 38mins 22secs...

Terragen...

Micropoly setting of 0.6 and AA5 and Pre-pass supersampling which resulted in a render time of 12hrs 50mins 33secs.

The resulting files were then masked, tweaked, composited and generally slapped into shape in Photoshop.
Title: Re: Atmospheric Ice Halo
Post by: Dune on March 17, 2017, 09:32:09 AM
Very cool! So now we need a whizzkid who can set something up within TG. Or just wait for Matt's brilliance...
Title: Re: Atmospheric Ice Halo
Post by: DannyG on March 21, 2017, 09:21:33 AM
Quote from: Ethrieltd on March 16, 2017, 06:44:36 PM

Terragen...

Micropoly setting of 0.6 and AA5 and Pre-pass supersampling which resulted in a render time of 12hrs 50mins 33secs.


Curious what resolution and hardware specs were you using to get such a high rendertime. That's extremely excessive. I can probably help you cut that at least in half in not more depending on your hardware
Title: Re: Atmospheric Ice Halo
Post by: Ethrieltd on March 21, 2017, 09:32:50 AM
Quote from: Danny on March 21, 2017, 09:21:33 AM
Quote from: Ethrieltd on March 16, 2017, 06:44:36 PM

Terragen...

Micropoly setting of 0.6 and AA5 and Pre-pass supersampling which resulted in a render time of 12hrs 50mins 33secs.


Curious what resolution and hardware specs were you using to get such a high rendertime. That's extremely excessive. I can probably help you cut that at least in half in not more depending on your hardware


Was actually rendered in 4K on an i5 3470 with 8gb... Can you perform any miracles? Water into wine? Loaf and fish multiplication?

I am currently waiting on a delivery of a new lot of memory, but as my motherboard only supports 16gb.... It won't do a whole lot, not sure if I was ever falling into the using swap space issue but I'm fairly sure it was close. Any worth while CPU upgrade would involve a whole new machine and the best part of £1000 which I don't have... So miracles?

Title: Re: Atmospheric Ice Halo
Post by: DannyG on March 21, 2017, 11:31:05 AM
Quote from: Ethrieltd on March 21, 2017, 09:32:50 AM
Quote from: Danny on March 21, 2017, 09:21:33 AM
Quote from: Ethrieltd on March 16, 2017, 06:44:36 PM

Terragen...

Micropoly setting of 0.6 and AA5 and Pre-pass supersampling which resulted in a render time of 12hrs 50mins 33secs.


Curious what resolution and hardware specs were you using to get such a high rendertime. That's extremely excessive. I can probably help you cut that at least in half in not more depending on your hardware


Was actually rendered in 4K on an i5 3470 with 8gb... Can you perform any miracles? Water into wine? Loaf and fish multiplication?

I am currently waiting on a delivery of a new lot of memory, but as my motherboard only supports 16gb.... It won't do a whole lot, not sure if I was ever falling into the using swap space issue but I'm fairly sure it was close. Any worth while CPU upgrade would involve a whole new machine and the best part of £1000 which I don't have... So miracles?

Nope, no miracles. I actually have questions for you in regards to your render settings, because there is no way this scene should take 13 hours to render with the hardware specs you provided.

What are the sample values in the atmo node as well as cloud layers?
Are you using Defer Atmo? (Raytracing)
Are you using Soft Shadows? If so what are the settings?
What are your GI settings? Srf

These are the normal culprits for excessive render times, if these are ok then we can dig a bit deeper. 13 hours is too long something is set too high/incorrectly

Title: Re: Atmospheric Ice Halo
Post by: Ethrieltd on March 21, 2017, 12:07:54 PM
Quote from: Danny on March 21, 2017, 11:31:05 AM

Nope, no miracles. I actually have questions for you in regards to your render settings, because there is no way this scene should take 13 hours to render with the hardware specs you provided.

What are the sample values in the atmo node as well as cloud layers?
Are you using Defer Atmo? (Raytracing)
Are you using Soft Shadows? If so what are the settings?
What are your GI settings? Srf

These are the normal culprits for excessive render times, if these are ok then we can dig a bit deeper. 13 hours is too long something is set too high/incorrectly

Atmosphere = 48
Clouds #1 = 1.02789
Clouds #2 = 0.57773 - Are these the values you mean?

Defer Atmosphere  = Yes
Soft Shadows = Yes (0.5/9)

GI Cache detail = 2
GI Sample Quality = 2
GI Blur Radius = 8
Pre-pass supersample = Yes
Occlusion weight = 1
BTO = 1
Radius in pixels = 24

GI In Clouds = Still/Very high

I was under the impression that it was my kindergarten level hardware that made things take a long time. Anything with a "heavy" atmosphere takes a long time on this machine or is as noisy as something really frakking noisy. From what I gather next to everyone's machines here are orders of magnitude better than mine.
Title: Re: Atmospheric Ice Halo
Post by: DannyG on March 21, 2017, 01:00:00 PM
Quote from: Ethrieltd on March 21, 2017, 12:07:54 PM
Quote from: Danny on March 21, 2017, 11:31:05 AM

Nope, no miracles. I actually have questions for you in regards to your render settings, because there is no way this scene should take 13 hours to render with the hardware specs you provided.

What are the sample values in the atmo node as well as cloud layers?
Are you using Defer Atmo? (Raytracing)
Are you using Soft Shadows? If so what are the settings?
What are your GI settings? Srf

These are the normal culprits for excessive render times, if these are ok then we can dig a bit deeper. 13 hours is too long something is set too high/incorrectly

Atmosphere = 48
Clouds #1 = 1.02789
Clouds #2 = 0.57773 - Are these the values you mean?

Defer Atmosphere  = Yes
Soft Shadows = Yes (0.5/9)

GI Cache detail = 2
GI Sample Quality = 2
GI Blur Radius = 8
Pre-pass supersample = Yes
Occlusion weight = 1
BTO = 1
Radius in pixels = 24

GI In Clouds = Still/Very high

I was under the impression that it was my kindergarten level hardware that made things take a long time. Anything with a "heavy" atmosphere takes a long time on this machine or is as noisy as something really frakking noisy. From what I gather next to everyone's machines here are orders of magnitude better than mine.


Your i5 3470 is 3.60Ghz 4 Core correct non laptop? If so although it doesn't hyperthread. That CPU with 16 GB of ram isn't all that bad. But yes there will be a whole new world with TG once you upgrade.
The atmosphere sample are too High in the atmo node and your 1st cloud layer. With defer on you can dial the main atm node back to est 24. When using very thin clouds you go as low as .6 - .8 while deferring. Only go above 1 when you are using thick cumulus. Also the GI in the clouds set at Still/Very High is too high for a still image (Used in animations mainly). Still/Medium (default) is adequate.
The settings you listed are causing the long render time. If you would like to see for yourself do some test renders at smaller res. Let me know how you made out
Cheers
Title: Re: Atmospheric Ice Halo
Post by: Ethrieltd on March 21, 2017, 01:20:49 PM
It's a 3.2ghz with Turbo Boost (that I've never seen any evidence of) desktop CPU.

I just installed my RAM as it just arrived via DPD. My heart survived the always somewhat fraught hardware replacement so I'll look into adjusting the settings you suggested.


**EDIT**

Well, there's been several "NVidia display driver stopped responding and has recovered" events since the upgrade (there's always something) which seem to originate in Firefox. After having reseated the GFX card/swapped the memory sticks into the opposite slots/selected memory speed in UEFI rather than "auto" and disabled HWacc in Firefox it seems to have stopped happening. There's always something...

**EDIT 2**

Have enabled HWacc in FF again for several hours and had no crashes, so, there's that...
Title: Re: Atmospheric Ice Halo
Post by: mesocyclone on March 21, 2017, 01:50:07 PM
Hello!

Beautiful composition!

As a huge fan of atmospheric optics, I always wanted to "import" sun halos into TG.
I know HaloSim, even used it for a while, it is a very nice program!

You've made a wonderful work here, congrats!



Title: Re: Atmospheric Ice Halo
Post by: masonspappy on March 21, 2017, 05:26:33 PM
Quote from: Ethrieltd on March 21, 2017, 01:20:49 PM
It's a 3.2ghz with Turbo Boost (that i've never seen any evidence of) desktop CPU.

Something I learned about my I-7 rig - the turbo boost only applies to only one core, even if all 4 are firing.  I guess there's a reason for it but I never figured out what it was.
Title: Re: Atmospheric Ice Halo
Post by: Ethrieltd on March 22, 2017, 11:55:59 AM
Quote from: masonspappy on March 21, 2017, 05:26:33 PM
Something I learned about my I-7 rig - the turbo boost only applies to only one core, even if all 4 are firing.  I guess there's a reason for it but I never figured out what it was.

From what I gather it's to maximise the performance of single threaded programs, but it feels a pretty pointless exercise to me. Somewhat like trying to maximise the performance of the velocipede...
Title: Re: Atmospheric Ice Halo
Post by: DannyG on March 22, 2017, 07:38:38 PM
If you have a decent cooling system OC it. I am running a 6 year old i7 2700K, never had any issues @ 4.5GHz ( 3.5GHz stock) Corsair H110 Hydro keeps it cool. My temps never go above 75C. Easy to install and cheap. Just be sure your case can fit it. If you have a standard tower get the H80. This is a very good mini hydro system. Lots of degrees for your buck

http://www.corsair.com/en-us/hydro-series-h110-280mm-extreme-performance-liquid-cpu-cooler (http://www.corsair.com/en-us/hydro-series-h110-280mm-extreme-performance-liquid-cpu-cooler)