Planetside Software Forums

Support => Terragen Support => Topic started by: David Burnett on December 28, 2006, 04:57:38 PM

Title: Sunlight on water, maybe a bug
Post by: David Burnett on December 28, 2006, 04:57:38 PM
After rendering my first 'proper' render, i.e. not just playing around, I did not like the
results of the sunlight reflected on the water.
See thread http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=186.0 (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=186.0)

After buying a licence, I tried rendering again with higher settings, increasing anti-aliasing helped
but I still did not like the results, increasing detail had no other effect than increasing the
rendering times, even with a quality of 3.

I decided to reduce the roughness of the water to see what the effect
would be,  reducing the roughness and smallest scale on the water shader.
I reduced them a little to far and got the attached image on a full render (cropped) with a quality of 1
and aa of 5.

Notice the really ugly rendering of the suns reflection on the edges of the 'waves', 
the anti-aliasing seems non-existent, especially compared to the rest of the edge.

Is this a bug or a quirk or the TG2's renderer ?

Title: Re: Sunlight on water, maybe a bug
Post by: Oshyan on December 29, 2006, 10:25:48 PM
The handling of extremely bright surfaces still needs some work. AA is designed to mostly deal with "normal" brightness ranges. When the brightness of something changes that dramatically within a small distance, AA can often be ineffective unless it's at ridiculous values. I think that's what you're seeing here. We will be working on specific handling of situations like this, where in photography or the human eye for example you might get a "glow" or "flare" effect.

- Oshyan