TG2 officials said there wont be need for downsampling in TG2. I trust that on detail 1 downsampling wont help anything. But detail 1 takes tremenderous times to render. Im wondering if downsampled detail 0.8 would get better render time and same looking render... well if u got what i mean i dont really know how to express myself now lol
Check this out. I made this page to illustrate the changes of AA and detail. You can see that 0.6 gives very high quality indeed (if you have enough samples in your clouds and atmosphere):
http://www.motionmagnetic.com/terragen2/render.html
Technically, downsampling (assuming we have the same definition here) would not be required b/c the level of detail is sub-pixel at whatever resolution - which is the magic of procedural programming. Of course non-procedural imported elements like 3d models or images do not apply.
Downsampling should theoretically never be faster than the best balance of detail settings. Achieving that good balance may be difficult in some cases, but I think it's worth getting to know the specifics of TG2's detail settings rather than trying to find the right oversampling resolution, which may be dependent on the scene just like the detail settings. Meanwhile the detail settings give you far more versatility and control than a simple downsample.
- Oshyan
In my experience this all depends on the content of the render but I would say downsampling is probably not needed if you get the original balance of render settings just right. However, I do have a render going at the moment which I have had to give very high detail and AA settings because it has lots of very narrow, long and contrasting but slightly modulating details, meaning that if I don't use these high setting I will get a lot of pixelated looking lines running across the render. Smaller details in the distance such as stones or grass can also cause problems because they are details at pixel level that will can noisy results unless the render settings are appropriate to smooth it.
By the way, in the situations I describe above, what is best to tweak higher - detail or anti-aliasing. Ot what kind of relationship between the two. Is the answer to concentrate mostly on anti-aliasing to smooth these pixelations?
AA deals specifically with high frequency noise. For example, if you have a look at the renders done at a detail of 0.1 here:
http://www.motionmagnetic.com/terragen2/render.html
you will see that increasing the AA makes the ground look a lot better, but hardly affects the clouds and sky.
But renders that have low detail and lots of antialiasing usually look over-smooth or even blurred (imo).
M.
Quote from: buchvecny on January 04, 2007, 04:17:12 PM
TG2 officials said there wont be need for downsampling in TG2. I trust that on detail 1 downsampling wont help anything.
I can only, confirm your trust.
Tried to render a quality 1 @1600*1000;
The resize+sharpen process (that usually dramatically boost the quality of an old terragen 0.x render) didnt boost anything.
Regards Max
cool guyz thx ;) (super stupid smilies annoy me..)
I agree that too much ant-aliasing can smooth things too much. it's tricky to get the balance right. I always go higher with detail than your tests njen. For a final render I always go at least detail level 1. In fact I have gone much higher but it depends on the scene.
Interesting. I find that I never have to go above 0.7 for near perfect results. Saves a bunch on rendering time too :)
Yea I usually like to do .8 detail and 5 antialiasing. I also render at either 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 so more smoothing is better for me, especially if I downsize the image.
I've got a kind of difficult render going at the moment. Under tests even detail 1 was not sufficient but usually that is what I set for final render but I agree that less could be OK. I experimented quite a lot with this scene. I decided it needed AA of 3 or 4 but even boosting the detail right up to 3 or 4 I could tell the difference. Detail 1 was obviously very inferior in comparison but usually this is not the case. I guess it's to do with what I explained before about lots of lines across the picture which need the higher rendering settings. So this render is a test of higher settings. I'd rather not repeat this again. Way too long render time.
Maybe the problem is that geometry was stretched along an axis. The final render will be fine but it needed more detail than usual.
Efflux, sounds like you've got a pretty extreme scene going there. I'd be interested in seeing the scene once completed as I have seldom seen anything that requires higher than detail 2, and even that is rare. I suspect extreme displacement is involved. :D
- Oshyan
It's not really that extreme. I do have a population of trees but there are only a few. I have a few fake stones and there are 3D clouds but not extreme. My problem is these stretched small scale ground displacements which run across the picture and the camera is at low POV. I've had similar problems in Mojo. Certain POVs need the extra detail otherwise it looks like pixelated lines even if a lot of the rest of the scene doesn't need it. However this render is also a quality test to see what kind of difference these setting make. I will show some pictures here of various settings on crops after the final render is finished. I'm expecting that to be tomorrow ::)
Sounds great, thank you. :)
- Oshyan
Looking forward to seeing this efflux!
M.
Well my attempts here to get an image out of TG2 with the same kind of anti-aliasing that you'd get by simply rendering at say twice the size and then downsizing have more or less failed because this render is going to take ages yet. I've made some mistakes because I should have reduced the GI since that's relative to detail but my opinion now is that your probably better using a reasonable detail level and anti-aliasing and then downsizing because that seems to take a fraction of the time. How exactly does the anti-aliasing work relative to the detail? Also what exactly does detail blending do? I did set that at 2. Since the render has been running so long I'm not going to stop it but I'm guessing it will take another day. The trees are taking a huge amount of time to render. I set them at top quality because that's what was needed.
This is a link to the final render of that scene where I had the quality problems. You can probably see why, because of all the horizontal lines. I haven't time at the moment but I will get back here with more details and render quality comparisons. The problems also involved the trees.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/media/folder_137/file_1361392.jpg
Nice render actually. Looks like a noise shader stretched along one axis. Some of the settings you've used would definitely increase render time and may not have had a positive impact on the final visual outcome. But I'll wait until you provide some more details (and ideally a sample .tgd) before commenting further. I still maintain that proper use of the existing detail controls will net you an equal or better result to downsampling in the same or lesser time.
- Oshyan
That final render had a touch of post work. Partly because my PC monitor was not calibrated properly and I edited the trees as I will explain.
Below are non post worked crops showing different render settings of the ground. The top one was detail 1 the bottom was detail 5! I hope you can distinguish that there are 2 renders pasted together here. I's not very clear. The top also had a lower anti-aliasing setting. I think AA 2 and the bottom was 4. Possibly I should have balanced it with more AA and less detail but I found it didn't completely correct the noisy look. I should definitely have reduced GI because that was way too high at setting 2 with detail 5 because I presume it is relative to detail. There is not much point in showing other cropped tests of this area because they are basically between these settings but you can see the difference. The ground textures are made with 4 Power Fractals. Two on flatter lower ground and two on slopes which you can't really see here. The larger one is stretched on 1 axis and there is a smaller one that provides some sand like grain at very close view. It was a problematic POV. When I initially worked on these textures I was at a totally different planet location so they were not as stretched but then I ran into populations problems being away from position 0,0,0. I didn't want to increase anti-aliasing too much and create a blurry image. This was actually my first proper render with TG2 Deep. It ended up taking several days but I won't be using these settings again. Detail 5 is extreme but I am just testing.
(http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/1566/desertplanet20detailqo9.jpg)
Another problem shown below is that trees in a detail 1 render looked like the top picture and at detail 5 they looked like the bottom. I also increased the trees own rendering quality one step to top level but I don't think this caused the effect:
(http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/8214/desertplanet20palmdetainq5.jpg)
Probably connected with relative increase of GI but I don't understand this. I hope you can see the problem here to do with darkness of colours. I have a 24 inch Eizo monitor which shows every single deficiency. These are awesome monitors by the way. I tried an Apple Monitor but it was so bad I sent it back. Pink shades down one side. Not even close to the quality of the Eizo.
The final image was post worked to change this tree problem because I thought some trees were too dark. I also actually had to initially completely edit the textures on the tree because otherwise they would have turned out very dark but it turned out that at detail 5 they were dark anyway and it was the same file taking the same edited tree textures. At first I though I had somehow got the original textures back but this was not so. Trees all seem to end up very dark in TG. When you use GI this is further exemplified. Maybe because the leaves would need to be transparent and reflective to look right even at distance.
well i have eizo monitor also and i just can agree. When i send some dark pictures to my mother she barely sees anything on her monitor...
And yeah the tree quality is related to GI not the tree quality.