Recent posts
#1
Last post by noahding1 - April 24, 2025, 03:33:57 AM
The bottom of the sky looks unnatural. How can we achieve the effect of cloud superimposition with a sense of layering at the bottom as referred to?How can the edge effect and internal detail levels of this volumetric cloud mass be achieved by reference? The edges and layering effect generated by TG are difficult to achieve in this way.
#2
Last post by Dune - April 24, 2025, 02:08:52 AM
Perhaps because during the day, moist has evaporated (by the sun's warmth), loads of cars excrete their fumes, work kicks up dust, so the air is fuller with particles, resulting in more breakage of sun's light, hence more reds.
AI will probably know. And I think it could be done in TG, but also easily adjusted by hand.
#3
Last post by Belmont224 - April 23, 2025, 02:28:59 PM
This is tangentially related to Terragen, and I'm just curious if anyone knows the answer.
Why does the sky for sunrises and sunsets seem different (at least where I'm located). Sunrises get more light blues, light yellows, lighter pastel type colors, but sunsets get the more vibrant and dramatic reds, purples, oranges, etc. You would think they would look the same as the whole process is similar (sun gradually becomes visible and lights up the sky). Where I'm located, sunrise if over land and sunset is over ocean so maybe that makes a difference?
Terragen doesn't make any distinction in this regard. If the sun goes down, it always looks like a sunset (to me anyway)
#4
Last post by Dune - April 23, 2025, 02:06:08 AM
Thank you both for chiming in! Good information to take into account, copied all.
Strange that this older GPU works less smoothly than the newer one, as that's one of the reasons I'd invest in a faster card. And being able to work in 3D and render a large scene at the same time, because I'm very anxious to do so now, afraid of crashes and having to start a render all over again.
#5
It could be that your viewport is looking through the Perspective view and not the desired render camera view. The current view is indicated by the second small icon below the Preview window. If you see a "P" in that icon it means you're viewing through the Perspective camera. If that's the view you want to render be sure to click the first small icon to the left of that icon to copy the current view (Perspective) to the render camera.
Also, if you've keyframed (animated) your camera, when you render it will always revert to the keyframed position.
#6
Last post by Blapeneve - April 22, 2025, 02:18:33 PM
I'm encountering an issue with Terragen 4 where, after setting up my scene, the render output appears completely black. I've ensured that the camera is correctly positioned and that the lighting is appropriately configured. The scene includes a terrain and some cloud layers, and everything looks fine in the preview. However, when I initiate the render, the output is just a black image.
I've checked the following:
The render node is connected to the correct camera.
The atmosphere and lighting are enabled.
The render settings are at their default values.
Has anyone experienced a similar issue or have suggestions on what might be causing this?
#7
I built a Threadripper workstation a few years ago primarily to render in Terragen and in that respect it's great. It's a Windows 10 system which means that the only way to utilize the full 64 cores (128 threads) at once during a Terragen render is to launch two instances of Terragen. That's fine for an animated sequence because one instance of Terragen is rendering the odd numbered frames while the other instance is rendering the even number of frames. Generally speaking using this workflow I end up with two rendered frames in the "time" it takes to render one. For still images I can render on an instance just dedicated to rendering, while working in another Terragen scene or another application all together. If you can build a Threadripper using Windows 11 this limitation should no longer apply.
I've not tried to render via render management applications like Deadline, or tried to render a large image in tiles and then have it stitched back together.
One thing I've noticed is that the user interaction in Terragen on my 13+ year old Intel 7 system with a GTX670 graphics card is much smoother and faster than on my Threadripper system, even though the new system has 4 times the memory and a 3080ti graphics card. Also, although I haven't tried this yet, Matt suggested I try reducing the number of cores per Terragen scene from the default 32 to see if it improves the perceived performance.
Overall I'm happy with the Threadripper. I render much larger images at higher quality than previously.
#8
Quote from: gao_jian11 on April 20, 2025, 09:05:07 PMAdditionally, I remember that the maximum number of cores supported by TG is 32 and the maximum number of threads is 64. Beyond these limits, it won't work. I wonder if this is still the case now.
That limit is gone apparently in Terragen 4.8.23 - from the release notes:
QuoteWe've removed a hard-coded maximum of 64 threads per render. This allows utilization of more than 64 cores/hyperthreads on Windows 11, Windows Server 2022, Linux, and Macs with more than 64 cores. Older versions of Windows may not benefit.
Agree with gao_jian11 on the GPU front if you're mainly working with Terragen, but then again who knows what will happen with TG and GPU rendering? - TG 5 has been in development for years now - maybe worth asking Matt if future versions will use GPU more (if he'll tell you
)
#9
Last post by Njen - April 21, 2025, 03:30:39 PM
You were right about your idea that it had to do with the GI cache. Usually on these long slow env shots I can get away with the GI cache being 32 frames apart every time, but I just did a test for this section of 16 frames apart, and it seems to have fixed the issue.
FYI, to answer your previous questions, the frames were rendered through Deadline on multiple machines, but then when I did a test on the same machine in the same Terragen session I was able to replicate the issue.
Thanks for your help!
#10
Last post by Dune - April 21, 2025, 02:35:40 AM
Thanks for your input, gao jian. There are indeed so many things to consider that it sometimes overwhelms me, like the frequency you mention, the number of cores/threads and whether they can all be utilized, I need to dive into CUDA (are they important?), etc.
You may well be right about a GPU, but I'm pretty anxious to purchase something this year, as I don't know how my income will be next year (tax deduction considerations and all). It doesn't need to be an ultimate machine, as that will keep changing over the years indeed, but a good price-performance average at this moment. A 10% speed gain for thousands of euro's isn't what I'm after. So it won't be the 32GB GPU's that are available.
Thnks for your points to keep in mind!
