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#91
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)
#92
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.
#93
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.
#94
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
)
#95
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!
#96
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!
#97
Last post by gao_jian11 - April 20, 2025, 09:05:07 PM
Additionally, 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.
#98
Last post by gao_jian11 - April 20, 2025, 09:03:06 PM
Dune，Updating the equipment is always exciting. I use threadrippers2990, which renders very fast, but the main frequency is a bit low. TG has very high requirements for the main frequency when creating scenes. The graphics card is changing too frequently. I don't recommend buying the latest one as it is expensive and will soon be replaced by a newer model. The GPU rendering by TG has to wait for a few years until better GPUs are available. At that time, there will be better GPUs on the market.
#99
Last post by Dune - April 18, 2025, 08:37:38 AM
I'm considering a new machine that will be used to build 3D stuff, compile landscapes in Terragen, and render. No gaming.
I now have a Ryzen 9 5900X, but there are better ones today. My GPU (GTX 1080 Ti) also needs to be a better one, as working in a pretty loaded TG preview screen is sometimes sluggish, and I get occasional complete computer crashes when doing something too fast.
So I can choose between Threadrippers and Ryzen 9 CPU's, and different NVidia RTX GPU's, of course with plenty DDR4 (or 5?) RAM, a good MB, etc. Some things may be overkill (also moneywise), so I wonder what you guys would recommend, taking into account future GPU rendering as well.
#100
Quote from: Belmont224 on April 17, 2025, 12:53:46 PMDo you do a mix with rendering some things in each program and combine them later? Terragen excels at what it is meant for (outdoor landscape type renders with clouds and such) and other renderers excel at what they were meant for (typically not realistic outdoor landscape type renders with clouds)
That's what I'm working on a.t.m. Check out:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?msg=300437Terrain is rendered in TG, everything else in Maya (car and foliage) and comped together in Nuke. This will be an animation, so I need to motion blur the car (no motion blur for objects as yet in TG).
I did try setting up all the foliage in TG, but it's better to have it Maya for this project, for shadowing, gi etc.
Once I've got a terrain, I setup a tiling camera in Maya and export that to TG, then use it to write out tiled terrain so I get managable (and higher rez) objs. For detail where the car is driving over the terrain, I'll replace those tiles with vector displacement tiles for the best detail.
I'm not rendering the imported terrain in Maya directly, but using it to generate shadow passes which is then comped over the terrain in Nuke (shadows from the car and plants)
The imported terrain matches the TG render pretty well and I can also use it to generated deep .exrs, so everything slots together in Nuke nicely.
p.s. all the terrain geometry and plants are converted to Arnold archives (.ass) - it's the only way to render efficiently in Maya. One of the things TG does really well is render huge plant populations, and of course, rendering complex terrains as micropoly displacements without breaking a sweat
