Hello, just thought I'd share something I am rendering right now...first image from Terragen I am posting anywhere. Just something simple, haven't really read any tutorials except on how to get a star picture in the background, other stuff I just got by playing around with the program. I know its hard to tell but the big planet on the bottom is supposed to only be water right now with clouds over it, but it looks more like its covered in trees lol, but like I said it was just by playing around with what I could figure out. I found out about this program a while back when I first started seeing wallpapers created in this on DeviantArt and I just thought I could try to create my own. I was trying to search the forums on the best/fastest way to render a good image (as you can see, my little pixelated image has taken over an hour already) but couldn't really find a topic just for that, big problem is rendering times....I saw a lot of topics on rendering farms and such, is that like the PS3's Folding@Home thing that connects PCs to render over the internet or is it only PCs on a network?
Edit: And here it is after 1 hour and 17 minutes.
Folding@home is a distributed computing (DC) project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics (MD). The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."
"Stolen" from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
So, unforutunatly your not really to get a render farm out of that, or anything like it. You wont get real time renders with this program because most real times use rasterization, although with recent developments a card that runs along side your graphics card has boasted it will speed ray-tracing renders up by 2000% (http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/03/computer-graphics-rendering.html).
For stars I put a starmap on the Background shader. You can do this by getting a star image (larger the better) and then go to
Objects Tab -> Background -> Surface Shaders -> "..." -> Create New Shader -> Other Surface Shader -> Default Shader
From there click the elipsis again and "Go to "Default Shader 01". From there add your starmap into the Luminosity Image and Translucency Image, Play around with the Luminosity Slider untill you get the effect you want.
Luminos is right, Folding@home works through packets which are sent by a central server to users around the world then results are sent back. TG2's networking (not yet implemented) is for computers on one local network.
However, I did make a topic, must be a year ago now, about using BOINC to allow a community render farm. Once the networking module is added to TG2 it will be possible to do this although there wasn't a massive surge in support for the idea. Don't know why to be honest.
Here's the topic anyhow
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4929.0
Instead of bumping the old thread ill post here, but I just read your topic and this would be an excellent idea, but it sounds like a feature that would be implemented at a later date. I'm sure people would be alot happier with faster rendering times. I know I would. But then I would need something complicated enough to take that long *cough* Mohawk *cough*:P
Just stay away from reflective shaders and water and you'll be fine ;)
no offense but an hour is nothing... my longest render was 6 and a half days for an image, but that was before multicore support and i didn't bother splitting it up between my cores.
most final renders now generally take between 12hours-day n half or so for me, which im fine with.
the distributed free tg2 renderfarm idea is kinda cool though.
This is correct, with TG2 (and especially on older machines like mine) the render times skyrocket. It's a good day (or a test render) if I finish anything in an hour.
Well, how fast should I be able to render this image on my system? I have AMD Athalon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ 2.59GHz, 2GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT XXX 256MB, Windows Vista Home Premium 32-Bit (not sure if the system matters).
I tried to render the same image again and mess with the priority on Windows Take Manager and set it to Realtime, my system I think froze in like 10 seconds. :P I thought I saw a thread a few days ago on best settings to render faster with but am unable to find it. I love the images that can be created with this but don't have the patience to wait days for something that might not be as good as I thought it would be, lol. Messing with the same image again but took off the clouds I here is where its currently at rendering.
Try doing Oshyan's Benchmark test, that'll show you how your system copes with TG2 compared to other people's systems.
You have to register before you have access to upload your time.
http://www.3dspeedmachine.com/?page=3&scene=40
Do you all get errors when opening that scene from Oshyan's Benchmark?
yes you will get some errors as the scene was created in a version of TG that we don't have access to (yet, maybe :) ), however this dose not effect the validity of the benchmark.
richard
If yer not sure if a scene will look good, that's what the quick (test) render and preview windows are for.
I don't know if I am using the wrong settings (left it all on default just set the subdiv cache up to 1000) or what but even the quick render is a little to pixelated to judge whether I should wait a few hours/days to create the final render.
I'm very intrigued by the texture of your distant planet, how was this achieved, it looks like brush strokes almost :)
richard
There is an odd crease running along the horizon though...
in fact, the stars look a bit odd and the quality of the render is pretty low.
Yet is appears to take over an hour? I am very interested in viewing the .TGD file, or at least knowing the samples of ATMO, the GI and AA settings, and quality setting for the render. Something seems off.
That crease I think is just because its not finished rendering, here is where its at right now. And I have attached my .tdg, like I said, its just something simple.
wow what in the world is killing the render time..... it shouldn't be taking that long... especially at those detail levels.
Quote from: neuspadrin on April 01, 2009, 01:55:18 PM
wow what in the world is killing the render time..... it shouldn't be taking that long... especially at those detail levels.
Perhaps because the planet is covered by water and maybe also perhaps because the other planet is part of a population of planets...
yeh i just was going through it.... its the population of planets causing the problem.
Suggestion: dont use populations of big planets ;).
heres a 2 minute render (i dont have your image maps so its not exactly same) with your same planet done as not a population...
basically, create a new single planet, then copy the current settings on that one of yours (all the center, radius, and angular position (heading, elevation, distance), and set the shaders back up with just a single planet and then you can up the render detail to .5 again, wallah.
Quote from: neuspadrin on April 01, 2009, 01:55:18 PM
wow what in the world is killing the render time..... it shouldn't be taking that long... especially at those detail levels.
You mean apart from the fact that the secondary planet is part of a population? :D
Here we are. rendered this in 53 seconds with a movie decoder running at the same time ;D
Edit: Almost forgot, here's the new TGD
Huh? Last time I tried, planet populations didn't work at all. They didn't work, exactly the same way that the sphere object doesn't work - Bounding boxes appear but no planets are inside them when you render. The same is true for the sunlight/lightsource nodes, you can make them into a population but they won't render.
I tried to replicate planets when I made the TG meta-cloud objects(they are just planets) to make 'push me/pull you' cloud forms. No cigar. You must add each individually.
I think that you are seeing only the single instance of the planet used in the populator here, since the planet node doesn't have a drop down option for 'single object' or 'member of a population', you can't replicate it.
Populations of planets don't work and is why I created my asteroid creator and uploaded it into the File Section.
Apparently it was doing something, because in the new versions the weird "painted spiky" look of the 2nd planet and some of the detail on the main planet are both gone...
i think its because with a "population of planets" it simply renders tons of planets on top of eachother, not actually distributing them. Thus mass increases in render time, and no extra planets.
Quote from: neuspadrin on April 01, 2009, 02:36:39 PM
i think its because with a "population of planets" it simply renders tons of planets on top of eachother, not actually distributing them. Thus mass increases in render time, and no extra planets.
But my metacloud objects are only 100m in radius. They still don't show up, nothing to do with being inside/on top of each other. Maybe it was TP5 I last tried this with, I'm going to test with the current version...
Nope, only the first instance(object maker) planet is visible in a population in the alpha build, too.
The new render looks different because I'm using a the default second planet atmosphere rather than the population atmospheres
Took 13 minutes 26 seconds for this one, guess I will start reading tutorials on doing good clouds and terrains for the planets.
Edit: I'm doing the benchmark thing to see how long it takes to render that. FINISHED, 46 minutes, 13 seconds....thats pretty bad isn't it? :P I tried to add them to the benchmark site but its not showing up.
Beats my hour and a half for the benchmark.
I need some tutorials on creating terrains, I found the sticky with tutorials but most links are dead. And right now I am trying a different camera angle, took off the water and added clouds and my terrain is looking very flat. :P But anyways, I am rendering it right now just for fun.
Edit: Finished, 27 minutes 19 seconds. Just playing around with the settings I think I found out how to make the terrain. :P Will upload a pic later.
Terrain Tab:
+PowerFractal
that's the starting point, unless you wanna use an apline fractal I guess.
Yeah Lol, I just found that. I am now adjusting the lighting and stuff of my scene before rendering it again. I love how easy it is to create scenes! :)
Edit: Here it is, 25 minutes 37 seconds later. I just noticed Microsoft Paint seems to reduce the quality of the image file when changing it to .jpg. Guess I should stick to Paint.NET.
Going places...
A little less noise on the clouds and some texturing would give this a place to go.
I had problems with getting rid of cloud noise for ages...until i learned that it was the atmosphere quality just as much as the cloud quality, so watch out for that. Putting them both up to about 0.7-0.8 has given me good clouds + good render times (also good to know that my 59mins on the benchmark wasnt so bad considering i work on a laptop)
Wow, 59 minutes, thats pretty good. Would more RAM help my rendering times? I have 2GB RAM and the rest of my specs are I think on page 2.
After watching this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KwxVO6Vtag I would just like to try and play around with creating a animation going from one planet to another but was wondering if my other planets planets could have actual terrains or is it only textures?
Messed with the quality and depth but I will need to keep playing around with it later. I am doing a render this morning before heading to class, will be done in a few more mins.
Edit: 30 minutes, 58 seconds.
ram helps a little during the process, but mostly ram will help during scenes where theres tons of object populations and such.
most of the rendering process is done with the processor power as the determinate of how long render will take.
is it just me or is the starmap only covering a third of the render with a very solid stop line?
I had the same problem, starmap is a color function...
you need to actually create an interal default shader in the background object, and add the star map as luminesence.
I noticed that, I was thinking it was maybe because of the lighting or something. I am messing around with it some more right now and am going to do in a bit.
Edit: Finally had time to render and upload my pic, 56 minutes 38 seconds rendering. Any idea why my larger planet in the background lacks the glow of the atmosphere? It seems to have the same settings as the other 2 so I don't know whats going on with it. I figured out the atmosphere problem, rendering right now, will upload later.
So its done now after, 1 hour 29 minutes and 32 seconds, took longer this time because I was converting/burning a video at the same time. Is there a way to paint my own clouds and terrains?