A quick test with the latest Alpha version and transparency. Fake stones are a mix of procedural and image maps.
Render time with a q6600 (3GHz) and 4Gb of ram was 1.5hours.
Quality 1, AA 5, GI 3,3
Just to give you an idea the new alpha version with multithreading renders Karsten's Benchmark in 50sec. With version 1.9.03.1 it used to take 3 min.
http://tg2bench.kk3d.de/ (http://tg2bench.kk3d.de/)
Saurav
Nice water, and great rocks ;). Good to see you finally managed to get one off :).
Lovely.
;D <-- spittle
Very interesting test, nice colors too.
Very nice shot. Great work.
you lucky sod!
great water love the greenish tint round the rocks ;D
pretty good render time as well :)
Watching this image, a question comes to my mind: Does water interact with stones or other objects? I mean, does objects produce some distortions or ripples or the like?
Quote from: RealUser on April 02, 2008, 04:51:56 AM
Watching this image, a question comes to my mind: Does water interact with stones or other objects? I mean, does objects produce some distortions or ripples or the like?
"I have a Dream !"
Quote from: seth93 on April 02, 2008, 05:12:58 AM
Quote from: RealUser on April 02, 2008, 04:51:56 AM
Watching this image, a question comes to my mind: Does water interact with stones or other objects? I mean, does objects produce some distortions or ripples or the like?
"I have a Dream !"
So do I ;D
Oshyan might be able to elaborate on that issue.
spotted this over at the alpha base...looks fab'!...rendertimes are definately improved...did a population test last night, it came in considerably quicker than I had estimated!
:D
That's nice, but when are we going to benefit?
Beautiful stones !
Nice! Thanks for sharing that,
@ RealUser: I'm sure someone will tell us ;)
Also: Arent the current Beta/Alpha testers restricted about what they can post by an NDA?
@Oshyan or @Matt - Will other things like terrain and fake stones be able to have this same transparency?
Quote from: calico on April 02, 2008, 02:46:54 PM
@Oshyan or @Matt - Will other things like terrain and fake stones be able to have this same transparency?
This is something I've been curious about too. "Transparent materials" were mentioned, so I am hoping to see some crystal formations and such with this...and/or maybe some ice formations.
oh me to! ;D
something like of superman returns ;D
Thanks for showing.
Actually I take that back; I am going to have to change into a clean shirt there is drool all down this one. ;D
Quote from: moodflow on April 02, 2008, 02:54:46 PM
Quote from: calico on April 02, 2008, 02:46:54 PM
@Oshyan or @Matt - Will other things like terrain and fake stones be able to have this same transparency?
This is something I've been curious about too. "Transparent materials" were mentioned, so I am hoping to see some crystal formations and such with this...and/or maybe some ice formations.
And we just know some fool will try a glass planet.
Quote from: RealUser on April 02, 2008, 04:51:56 AM
Watching this image, a question comes to my mind: Does water interact with stones or other objects? I mean, does objects produce some distortions or ripples or the like?
Not yet. You would have to add your own displacement to do that. But eventually I hope to be able to provide some functions that allow you to get some information about distance from terrain and/or objects. I can't make any promises just yet.
Matt
Quote from: calico on April 02, 2008, 02:46:54 PM
@Oshyan or @Matt - Will other things like terrain and fake stones be able to have this same transparency?
Any object or surface can be made transparent (currently only with the water shader but that should get you started). However, this won't always give you the effect you expect. If you added transparency to a particular layer on the terrain (e.g. a Fake Stones Shader), it would just make the planet transparent at that point, so you would see through the terrain and see that the planet is hollow. To have transparent rocks sitting on an opaque terrain you would need those rocks to be separate objects, not just a displacement of the planet.
Matt
"...To have transparent rocks sitting on an opaque terrain you would need those rocks to be separate objects, not just a displacement of the planet."
Yes, Matt, but this is the fun of TG2. ;D
Now, to figure out how to do this. Heehee.
Quote from: Matt on April 02, 2008, 06:08:23 PM
Quote from: RealUser on April 02, 2008, 04:51:56 AM
Watching this image, a question comes to my mind: Does water interact with stones or other objects? I mean, does objects produce some distortions or ripples or the like?
Not yet. You would have to add your own displacement to do that. But eventually I hope to be able to provide some functions that allow you to get some information about distance from terrain and/or objects. I can't make any promises just yet.
Matt
What about something like the suds and ripples features that were in the old terragen 0.9? Surely a more advanced version of that would be cool for terragen 2. :)
Hmmm, I could think of an automatic masking of the stone shader or whatever and use this for restricting the distortions or ripples. Possible?
can I get a screenshot of the GUI options added for water transparency....just want to see....
this is looking amazing!...
The "surf and foam" functionality would require the same base features as ripples, I believe. So when a "distance from terrain/objects" function is available this could be used for both purposes (and much more). It could then be encapsulated into an easy-to-use shader or clip file.
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on April 03, 2008, 04:22:46 PM
The "surf and foam" functionality would require the same base features as ripples, I believe. So when a "distance from terrain/objects" function is available this could be used for both purposes (and much more). It could then be encapsulated into an easy-to-use shader or clip file.
- Oshyan
Interesting. :)
Quote from: Matt on April 02, 2008, 06:12:59 PM
To have transparent rocks sitting on an opaque terrain you would need those rocks to be separate objects, not just a displacement of the planet.
Matt
There is a Separate Geometry option in the Fake Stones shader. Either it doesn't work or more likely I am not using it correctly but if I activate this option my stones disappear. ??? :(
Comments, possibilities; Instructions?
Hey, Lamppost, great question. I can't wait to hear how the Separate Geometry works with Fake Stones, since I wondered from what Matt said if we might need imported objects (hope not, though).
Quote from: Mr_Lamppost on April 04, 2008, 12:19:54 PM
There is a Separate Geometry option in the Fake Stones shader. Either it doesn't work or more likely I am not using it correctly but if I activate this option my stones disappear. ??? :(
Comments, possibilities; Instructions?
The idea is that it would create separate objects, as you imagine, but I was never able to finish that. For now you should not use that feature.
Matt
Quote from: calico on April 04, 2008, 12:26:26 PM
Hey, Lamppost, great question. I can't wait to hear how the Separate Geometry works with Fake Stones, since I wondered from what Matt said if we might need imported objects (hope not, though).
If you want transparent rocks that show terrain behind them, it's best if the rocks are not part of the terrain. I suppose you can make transparent rocks as long as you don't mind the bottom of the rocks punching through to the nothingness underneath the terrain ;)
Matt
Eh? What...er...uh. I'm lost.
Better yet - do you think it will be possible to make crystal-like rocks by using the water shader (Beta version, I mean) and controlling the coloring through that? Or should we forget about Fake Rocks having any tranparency capability?
Quote from: Matt on April 04, 2008, 09:28:53 PM
...the bottom of the rocks punching through to the nothingness underneath the terrain ;)
Matt
I asked for a Procedural Crystal Generator as some of you may recall that would produce with the right development the kind of formations been talked about here as well as the crystal structures found in all rocks no matter the type, as well as small crystal grains such as quartz: that thread is here http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=643.0 but was dismissed a fresh look maybe called for on this issue, after the Gold release and development time permitting.
The idea of Terragen is the representation of the natural world or at least that is what I have be lead to understand, I also have an understanding of the human perceptual system and how it is keyed to look for certain details that it knows form its model of the world (Formed form both learning and direct experience) of what certain things look like rock by way of example, if any of these elements are missing no matter how small they maybe then the image when presented to the visual cortex via the eyes will look wrong even if the viewer cannot immediately say what is wrong with the image.
I have had this conversation in the past (Or tried to any way) with people here about how Terragen cannot simply focus on the large picture (The Micro View as it where) while the equally important smaller scale (The Macro View) goes unattended. What do I mean by this statement? A person goes for a walk in a mountain wilderness and stops by a ford (Small Stream) for a rest but also to take in the vista that surrounds him, within his visual field there is a small bolder field with ice clearly visible; his visual cortex assimilates the formation, texture, color, grain structure of the boulders while simultaneously noting the inclusions, trapped air bubbles and so forth of the ice among a million or so other small details of the scene, in other words the minutia of the world which depending of how one looks at it may seem trivial but you cannot assert it is not there unless you have an underlying psychological condition.
The point of the above it to illustrate that nature the closer you move up to it (Yes I know, way to go captain obvious) the more layers of complexity you are presented with, for me the one bane I have with terrain software and have done since I used the demo of Vesta (Now Vesta Pro) from the cover disk from Amigia Format Magazine is that its like some one smoothed the rocks with some thing that is a strange mix of plastic and plaster, swept up all the rocks and dirt and removed all the diverse plant and animal life, what you could call "Nature Sanitized".
If any of the above sounds like wanting New York before Captain Cook (And some may say the Vikings before him) had even left port for that historically important and fateful voyage then I am sorry meaning that for Terragen is in the early days yet, but "Wise men plan and see while the rest do not) as it where. ;D
Regards to you.
Cyber-Angel
This is incredible, 3min -> 50 sec?! :o
I suppose your Q6600 is @stock.
I'm gonna get mine q6700 very soon so I can start of with this =D , can't wait until they make the multithreading version public!
do you mean 1.5 hours WITH multithreading for a 800 pxiel image ?
it seems not very quick for a small image ??
i may have not understand
Quote from: Mr_Lamppost on April 02, 2008, 05:19:39 PM
Thanks for showing.
Actually I take that back; I am going to have to change into a clean shirt there is drool all down this one. ;D
Quote from: moodflow on April 02, 2008, 02:54:46 PM
This is something I've been curious about too. "Transparent materials" were mentioned, so I am hoping to see some crystal formations and such with this...and/or maybe some ice formations.
And we just know some fool will try a glass planet.
That'd be me :D
Didn't understand...
what does mean Q6600???
Quote from: ro-nin on April 22, 2008, 04:35:59 PM
Didn't understand...
what does mean Q6600???
Saurav's intel quadcore cpu.
I really wanna hear more about the new rendertimes with new multithreading!!!!!!!!!!
There has been a couple of years now that I've been watching all this talking and talking about the so called Multithreading process, but what is it at all???
Quote from: osmose on April 22, 2008, 03:22:46 PM
do you mean 1.5 hours WITH multithreading for a 800 pxiel image ?
it seems not very quick for a small image ??
i may have not understand
Water renders slow anyways, and I imagine even slower with transparency, so 1.5 hours is really fast in my oppinion.
-
Yeah....... what he said ???
In TG2 we haven't yet been able to completely separate the GUI thread from all other heavy computation, but we have separated the main bulk of rendering into separate threads. This helps keep the GUI fast when it's in the middle of a render or rendering a preview pass, but there are still parts of the renderer and other CPU-heavy stuff executing in the main thread (with the GUI) so it's not ideal yet. We'll continue to work on that after 2.0 release.
The main improvement that you'll see with multi-threaded TG2 is that rendering completes in a much shorter time if you have multiple CPUs or multiple cores. That also applies to the 3D Preview because it uses the same renderer. I concentrated on the main bulk of the renderer - everything that happens while a single bucket (tile) is rendering - and moved that into separate threads. Now multiple buckets can render in parallel, so if there are multiple processors/cores the render will complete much sooner. Initialisation and cleanup at the start and end of a render still happens in the main thread, as do other things like population calculation, heightfield operators, etc. so there's no improvement there. There's much to work on in the future.
Matt
Quote from: Matt on April 23, 2008, 01:14:40 PM
...everything that happens while a single bucket (tile) is rendering...
Hmm, so one render tile, is a bucket size... now I understand. But what defines the bucket size, is it standard per application, or is it affected by the system? For example, if I install more memory, will the rendered tiles be bigger? I have noticed the tile size changes relative to the total images' size or resolution...
Bucket is probably a strange word when 'tile' is more appropriate. I call them buckets simply because that's what they are called in some other renderers, even though their reasons for bucketing are quite different from those in Terragen and their buckets are usually much smaller. In PRMan, for example, the term 'bucket' makes more sense because it's motivated by the desire to keep only a small number of micropolygons in play at any one time (I think). For PRMan the bucket refers more to the bucketing of the render data rather than the image. For Terragen, larger buckets mean faster rendering but they use more memory for the anti-aliasing buffer and need to be reduced when the AA is high.
In build 1.9.04.1 the bucket size depends on the anti-aliasing setting. For higher anti-aliasing levels it uses a smaller bucket so that the anti-aliasing buffer is always 1000x1000 or less. This means that with anti-aliasing level 5 the buckets are 200x200 pixels or smaller.
With multi-threading Terragen uses other criteria to decide how large a bucket can be. Generally it uses smaller buckets when there are more threads to take advantage of the parallelism. You don't really get to control it I'm afraid ;)
Matt
Wow, thanks for that. It makes sense...
So when not using the multithreading option, I can increase the bucket size, or tile size, by using low AA. So basicly, low AA increases renderspeed...
Nice!
Still, I rather have high AA... ;D
Many thanks for the explanations Matt. This is very interesting stuff for sure! 8)
Many thanx for Harvey and Matt!!!
QuoteThat also applies to the 3D Preview because it uses the same renderer.
That's great news! With a (once upon a time) top of the line gfx card I was somewhat frustrated by the preview speed.
monks
Monks, we've just decided to temporarily disable multi-threaded previews for the upcoming public alpha while we iron out some problems. (Multi-threaded renders are still possible though).