Bob: Notwithstanding the inordinately long render time (98.52.09), I am pleased with the results. Atmo and clouds samples were set very high. My interest was piqued when I saw Dune's 'Aurora' image in the Image Sharing : ( http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=11615.0 ). In that thread, a .tgd file was posted by TheBlackHole which I used to find out how the clouds were stretched ( aurora.tgd ). I played with this file trying to stretch the clouds in their 'Y' axis to achieve an aurora appearance; but, to no avail.
About that time, Markal ( Mark ) expressed an interest in doing a TG2 collaboration. I sent him a few files; and, we decided we'd do the 'Aurora' project. Mark changed the terrain I used to his own ( Desert High .ter ). He then hit on the first sun which I had below the horizon and gave it an elevation of 355.873 which didn't make any sense to me - but, it worked.
I will post the .tgd of this image in the File Sharing if anyone is interested in checking it out. We'd be interested in your ideas on improving upon the render time. Other elements used for this image include:
• Lucio's 'Embossed Snow'.
• XFrog's 'Atlas Cedar'.
Enjoy,
Bob
Mark: Thanks Bob, it was a fun and learning experience. Everyone should try at least one collaboration ...you might really like it.
Looking forward to responses, critical or praise; but, I really want someone to figure out how to raise and shorten the aurora's min/max height and shorten the render time.
Check out the files and send your ideas/suggestions to me or Bob ...we both would appreciate it. Thanks!
Mark
Someone please help Bob and I....this image took forever to render. The clouds/atmo form the Aurora but, the clouds are streched too tall and require a high quality rating to get rid of noise and thus a long render time. The aurora effect could be improved if the the clouds were shorter and not streching from horizon to the top of the image. How can this be done? Any thoughts....Bob and I agreed to share the files for someone/anyone to help and come up with an improvement to this start of an Aurora Borealis. Picture this Aurora over a large lake with reflections.....or as Bob suggested....over a city!!! It can be used over and over in many ways but, it needs some improvement....HELP!!!
I'll post another version of this image with a different view soon and you'll see the possibilities.....
Thanks
Mark
Very pleasing scene ... I can feel the touch of your (Mark) Classic renders. I would really like to be there and watch the Aurora.
If I'd had any idea about atmospheres, I would be glad to help.
i think i posted the tgcin here or was it the settings a few yrs ago under the name terrade (which i cant get back on here under that name for some reason), anyway I did a load of these but failed to get the light like you have here, I can post a tgd here if it helps.
Excellent image tho
I think your clouds are way too high. That increases rendertime of course, and the photo's of aurora's I saw didn't have this high 'stretching', and less sharp 'lines'. You might want to try less high clouds at lesser height... I'll check out your tgd later, of course.
---Dune
Nice render. Although, I'm sure you're, both of you, quite mad! ;) ... I looked at the .tgd you posted and was very surprised to see the quality settings you have used, in both clouds and atmosphere. There are some 370 atmosphere samples (roughly), and with a cloud quality of '50', creating over 600 cloud samples, it's no surprise that this took so long to render!
I've got to wonder, was it really necessary to use such extremely high settings to clean up the noise? Especially in the atmosphere, there are very little atmo-shadows involved in your scene. I can understand that the clouds, with all that stretching(500 Y), need to be set pretty high but Q=50?
And, surely '-4.2' is easier to type than '355.873' for sun elevation. After all, it can only be set between -90 and 90 degrees. ;)
I've not tried to render any of it myself yet but I'm paring back the settings and I'll see if it can be tweaked any at my end later on.
It is a lovely, clean scene, though! I wish I had you guys' patience! :D
Very nice render and massive render time :) I agree with Dune that aurora could be a little smoother, but otherwise very nice looking.
* You'd probably be best to use the localize cloud feature too. Then, you could situate the clouds above your mountains/lake/city, whatever, and they won't reach to the horizon.
First of all: AWESOME render, I totally love it!
Secondly, you absolutely have to ray trace the atmophere for a scene like this. I bet you could let AA at 3, use atmo sampling of 24-32 and cloud sampling of 1/3 of what you used now to get a good quality render at possibly much lower render times.
Frank
Quote from: Volker Harun on March 04, 2011, 02:17:23 AM
Very pleasing scene ... I can feel the touch of your (Mark) Classic renders. I would really like to be there and watch the Aurora.
If I'd had any idea about atmospheres, I would be glad to help.
Thanks Volker, I'm feeling there will be another iteration in the works.
Quote from: Redwolf on March 04, 2011, 03:22:16 AM
i think i posted the tgcin here or was it the settings a few yrs ago under the name terrade (which i cant get back on here under that name for some reason), anyway I did a load of these but failed to get the light like you have here, I can post a tgd here if it helps.
Excellent image tho
Thanks Redwolf, by some of the responses, I'm beginning to get some thoughts on redoing this image with some different settings. Thanks for the offer.
Quote from: Dune on March 04, 2011, 05:07:43 AM
I think your clouds are way too high. That increases rendertime of course, and the photo's of aurora's I saw didn't have this high 'stretching', and less sharp 'lines'. You might want to try less high clouds at lesser height... I'll check out your tgd later, of course.
---Dune
Thanks Ulco, by some of the suggestions we see here, I'm thinking Mark and I will give it another try. I appreciate any additional thoughts you may have.
Quote from: dandelO on March 04, 2011, 07:03:29 AM
Nice render. Although, I'm sure you're, both of you, quite mad! ;) ... I looked at the .tgd you posted and was very surprised to see the quality settings you have used, in both clouds and atmosphere. There are some 370 atmosphere samples (roughly), and with a cloud quality of '50', creating over 600 cloud samples, it's no surprise that this took so long to render!
I've got to wonder, was it really necessary to use such extremely high settings to clean up the noise? Especially in the atmosphere, there are very little atmo-shadows involved in your scene. I can understand that the clouds, with all that stretching(500 Y), need to be set pretty high but Q=50?
And, surely '-4.2' is easier to type than '355.873' for sun elevation. After all, it can only be set between -90 and 90 degrees. ;)
I've not tried to render any of it myself yet but I'm paring back the settings and I'll see if it can be tweaked any at my end later on.
It is a lovely, clean scene, though! I wish I had you guys' patience! :D
Thank you Martin, much appreciate your ideas here and anything else you may come up with. Yes, the noise/graininess we got initially prompted the high atmo/clouds quality settings. I'm sure Mark and I will be re-doing this one soon. The upside for me was that I thought of several new projects while waiting for this one to finish its rendering.
Quote from: Mor on March 04, 2011, 07:14:45 AM
Very nice render and massive render time :) I agree with Dune that aurora could be a little smoother, but otherwise very nice looking.
Thanks Mor, appreciate your visit and comments.
Quote from: dandelO on March 04, 2011, 07:17:54 AM
* You'd probably be best to use the localize cloud feature too. Then, you could situate the clouds above your mountains/lake/city, whatever, and they won't reach to the horizon.
Martin, when I saw this response of yours, I slapped myself in the head - now why didn't I think of that - I've used it before; I think I need to change my brand of beer.
Quote from: FrankB on March 04, 2011, 10:18:57 AM
First of all: AWESOME render, I totally love it!
Secondly, you absolutely have to ray trace the atmophere for a scene like this. I bet you could let AA at 3, use atmo sampling of 24-32 and cloud sampling of 1/3 of what you used now to get a good quality render at possibly much lower render times.
Frank
Thank you Frank, these comments including yours are adding up to another, better adjusted render. If we can reduce the render time and reconstruct the cloud settings, we'll be closer to what we wanted to do in the first place. Even a change of aurora color would be nice.
One question..............why did you use the .obj type for your populations instead of the .tgo? There is a helluva difference in the file size.
Back to looking............
Quote from: yossam on March 09, 2011, 03:20:45 PM
One question..............why did you use the .obj type for your populations instead of the .tgo? There is a helluva difference in the file size.
Back to looking............
To answer your question, the model was only available as an .obj, not a .tgo.
I downloaded the .tgo from Xfrogs' site last night. They must have added it to the download.
Quote from: yossam on March 09, 2011, 05:44:31 PM
I downloaded the .tgo from Xfrogs' site last night. They must have added it to the download.
Glad you have it. Suggestion: The actual Atlas Blue Cedar has beautiful blue colored needles. You might consider taking the needles part into Photoshop or other program and increase the blue color; also, increase the brightness a little. I also took the diffuse setting to the max - this all depends on your lighting of course.
Wonderful project. Nice to see people collabing here too!
So it looks like the file you posted yields different results than your final. I did manage to reduce render time significantly (depending on what kind of hardware your original 90hr time was clocked on). The attached image took 8 hours and 25 minutes with 8 render threads on my i7 920. Still a very long render, but better. Unfortunately it is not directly comparable since the end result is so different, but I do think my settings would reduce render time on the actual scene fairly well too.
I will post the TGD once I can verify the render time savings on the actual scene.
- Oshyan
Oshyan, thank you for taking your time to get into this file. I look forward to your .tgd and study your settings. Both Mark and I feel there are a lot of interesting possibilities for some great looking images here.
Bob
Hi Bob, can you share the actual TGD that made the image(s) in this thread? The one in File Sharing produces the result above, which is too different from your image to be sure of the render time improvement.
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on March 11, 2011, 01:22:07 AM
Hi Bob, can you share the actual TGD that made the image(s) in this thread? The one in File Sharing produces the result above, which is too different from your image to be sure of the render time improvement.
- Oshyan
I can upload the .tgd here Oshyan; but, I cannot upload the 'Desert High' .ter file; or, the Atlas Cedar plant. Would the .tgd alone be sufficient?
The TGD would be fine, I have the terrain you sent me, and the tree object is not necessary IMO to test the render time well enough (with raytraced objects it would not add too significantly to the render time).
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on March 11, 2011, 01:30:20 AM
The TGD would be fine, I have the terrain you sent me, and the tree object is not necessary IMO to test the render time well enough (with raytraced objects it would not add too significantly to the render time).
- Oshyan
Thanks; here it is...
Bob
Hmm, is that the same as the one posted before? Because it has the same name and size, and that's the one I based my version on, which looks totally different. I guess it's possible it's a difference in rendering with the alpha, but that would be a pretty dramatic change...
- Oshyan
Here is the prior one I started with...
Also, the original one I sent to Mark just before we started the collab...
Strange, those all produce similar (incorrect) results. It appears due to one of the 2 suns. I will try to test on the current release version tomorrow and see if it's an alpha issue. If so it may be a clue to a bug in recent changes, which would be good to catch!
- Oshyan
I hope you find it Oshyan; what a relief that would be.
I tweaked Aurora 3 a bit to get similar results and re-rendered with further adjusted render settings. Render time now down to 7 hours and 25 minutes, there's a bit more noise but not bad (less than your original version I'd say). Image is attached.
Here are the basic settings:
Atmosphere samples: 12
Cloud samples: 52
Raytraced Atmosphere: On
Antialiasing: 4
Sampling: Customized, 1/16 first samples, 0.01 Pixel noise threshold
That should get you similarly lowered render times, depending on your hardware of course. I didn't test a full render with your original settings (especially since your TGD looked very different on my system anyway), but I would guess this cut render time down by a factor of 4 or more. Note that the cloud samples and especially atmosphere are way lower than what you had. The raytraced atmosphere is doing all the work.
I'm still going to test on the public release later today for comparison. I'll report my findings.
- Oshyan
A big thanks Oshyan, as soon as my render is finished, I will begin to make the adjustments you suggested - really looking forward to this. In the image you posted here, I noted that the aurora section on the lower left appears down into the terrain - like a rainbow. Odd; but, maybe other cloud seeds will change that.
The render I'm working on has also been a very long one. It may not be finished until late Saturday.
Bob
Following up with testing on the Aurora 3 file under the public (free) version: it appears to give the same/similar results to what I was getting on the alpha version, so I can only conclude that the files you've been posting are *not* the same configuration/file that was used to produce the images in the beginning of this thread. Certainly the configuration is similar, but Markal must have made other changes or something, because there are some significant differences in the rendered result. It's fine though, the render time savings should hold true regardless.
I forgot to mention I also reduced main detail to 0.5 because I felt 0.8 was overkill for this scene. In particular when you're raytracing the atmosphere detail is not going to have an effect there, it's now controlled by antialiasing level, and meanwhile the terrain is fairly dark so high detail is not required. Not to mention that again with raytraced objects, the detail level is controlled by the antialiasing. So as long as you get those settings right, everything will look good and render faster with 0.5 detail.
- Oshyan
* On the side...
I've noticed extreme differences between renders when cloud layers have used higher that Q=1.
As example(and sorry, I don't even have any temp files to back this up but, I remember clearly as it's a WIP that I often open...), I have a file that uses Q=4 for cloud detail and looks lovely(this cloud layer is used as an atmosphere in itself, at ground level as a haze, and looks terrible at Q=1, the entire scene looks different at Q=1) Could this be the difference in output you're experiencing, Oshyan? I only post because I remember Bob/Markal's file used around 'Q=50' for quality so, it would then give an extremely different output than what you might have tuned it to use in an optimized version...
* All quality settings I refer to here are cloud detail only, not render detail. To clear up any confusion. *
You don't need suns to make the aurora visible. Just turn up the ambient color in the cloud layer.
@Dandelo: but that should only give differences in the render quality itself, and not for example change the location of the clouds.
Hey Mark; you out there? Why don't you jump in here and give us your thoughts.
Oshyan, Martin, your input in very important to us. We'll keep on with this until we reach an acceptable solution. Thanks so much.
Frank, I don't mean 'render quality' of 1 and 4, I just mean cloud quality of '1 and 4' produces extremely different results. If I have time tonight I'll render out differences in these files, all that is changing is cloud quality, not scene detail. Hopefully back later...
Hmm, I must retract what I said earlier! It turns out I had been testing on the wrong version again. The current public release *does* have different results from the alpha. So I will look into this further on the development side. Good thing we caught it!
- Oshyan
Some of the biggest changes I made to Bob's original file is:
lighting: envirolight - Ambient Occlusion....this lightened the image and helped the glowing effect so, I darkened the overall image under the renderers - effects - contrast and gamma correction.
atmosphere: both density fractals I increased the warp to 12 and 11 and also checked vertical warp...changed the noise type to perlin ridges and re-seeded many times....decreased the clouds to 858 and increased the depth to 5095. Sun glow amount was also increased. Dune mentioned the high cloud heights....the clouds are low. I think its the warp that has streached them to appear high and to cause the folds or curtain like appearence.
Hope this helps....thanks to all for putting up with me and your own inputs will be recognized when this file becomes available to all for free. Yeah a "Team" effort! :)
Thanks
Mark
Thanks for the additional details Markal. Hopefully my render setting recommendations will help you produce new versions of this scene with less headache! ;D
We have identified the issue I discovered and are working on resolving it. So it was very helpful to work with this scene actually, it identified the issue very clearly.
- Oshyan
Thanks to all of you for your inputs. Now, I need to summarize all of these suggestions and start re-working the image. My other render is near completion. Once that is done, I'll be back to: 'Borealis - North Light'.
Bob
Thanks to all - this is the result of all the great suggestions by you folks: '6 hours, 49 minutes' render time. Much better than that 98 hour penance doer.
One last thing I'd like to do is see the bottom of the aurora; i.e., shorten it up so that one may be able to see a limited height of the aurora - bottom to top.
The adjustments I've made to the file are as follows:
• Reduced atmosphere samples to 12.
• Reduced the cloud samples to 52
• Checked 'ray-traced' atmosphere to 'on'.
• Set 'anti-aliasing' to 6
• Adjusted sampling to 'customized' 1/16 first samples; 0.01 pixel noise threshold.
• Although it was suggested to increase the soft shadow samples, I left it the way it was.
• Tried the 'localization' of the clouds; but, that did not work.
• Re-set Mark's 1st sun's elevation from 355.873 to 300.
• For the Full Render, Detail was set at 0.8; Anti-aliasing at 6 instead of 4.
In all, there are probably many other tweaks that could be made here; but, at this point, I'm ready to move on. Should you have any thoughts, please pass them on to Mark or I.
Bob
Very nice. I'm glad to see the setting suggestions really brought the render time down. I liked the green color that was in the previous iterations, but this is good too.
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on March 14, 2011, 11:53:56 PM
Very nice. I'm glad to see the setting suggestions really brought the render time down. I liked the green color that was in the previous iterations, but this is good too.
- Oshyan
Yes, they sure did Oshyan. I liked the green mixed with the blue. Lowering the sun as I did took away the brightness at the horizon; but, took away the green as well.
Very beautiful render, Bob! I like this much better than the 1st version. Also good that there was no nervous breakdown because of the feedback ;)
Again, lovely render, amazing scenery!
Cheers,
Frank