Ummm, the Terrain section broke...

[Draigr]

Ummm. Yeah, check the attached image. I'm getting a weird checkerboard thing going on with the render, and I don't know what's up. The clouds are at a 50k altitude (The scene is huge, the camera's at 9k altitude).

I kinda need to clean it up by tomorrow or I'm partially screwed.

Anybody got an idea of what's going on?

[Henry Blewer]

Try turning off GI detail checkbox in the render tab. Raytraced atmosphere does not like this.

I had the same issue. Turning off the GI will fix this. You can adjust the AA higher if necessary. The atmosphere quality samples at 0.2 to 0.25 work very well with the AA set to 6.

[Draigr]

Is that the GI surface details checkbox?

[dandelO]

Try turning off GI detail checkbox in the render tab. Raytraced atmosphere does not like this.

I had the same issue. Turning off the GI will fix this. You can adjust the AA higher if necessary. The atmosphere quality samples at 0.2 to 0.25 work very well with the AA set to 6.

I don't know about that(or what most of it means, Henry ;P). ^^
GI surface details isn't required for this scene, all you'll see by enabling it is a longer render and since these render discrepancies appear not on surfaces but on atmosphere, it shouldn't be that causing the glitch, regardless if it was used or not.

There are loads of clouds in the scene... Check that you have each layer's 'acceleration cache' set to 'none - highest detail'? I think that's more likely to fix the problem. The clouds are playing a pretty big part in the general makeup of this very atmospheric scene.

Also, raising AA will not help you if you turn off GI, it will only make your atmosphere and surface edges more noise-free. It doesn't help to boost GI, using separate fill lights or an ambient occlusion envirolight are pretty much the only ways to brighten up a non-GI scene.

First stop=optimizations tab of each cloud layer. Hopefully that's some help.

[Draigr]

I know it sounds very noobie, but I did literally pick up terragen this weekend. But I can't for the life of me find any checkboxes for GI beyond the surface details one, which has been off for some time.

Testing your theory now.

[Draigr]

The theory is mostly tested... It takes a while on these kinds of settings.

Great advice, it seems to have solved the problem!

Thanks a lot guys!

[dandelO]

Guess I must be wrong then(a common thing ;p).

This render discrepancy happened because of 'GI surface details' and RTA? Not what I've ever experienced before, or would have assumed in the slightest.

My apologies, Henry, spot on diagnosis! Never saw anything like this due to those settings.

[ethan]

Had this recently too - Turning on the Ray Trace Atmosphere in the render node seems to fix it.

-ethan

[Tangled-Universe]

Had this recently too - Turning on the Ray Trace Atmosphere in the render node seems to fix it.

-ethan

You should have this enabled by default, as raytrace shadows in the rendernode makes sure that general shadows are being rendered/calculated correctly.

If I understood correctly you can get these errors when using ray traced atmosphere together with GI surface details and disabling the latter solves the issue.

[FrankB]

by the way, this is a really fantastic render if it's true you just picked up TG2 over the last weekend. Congrats!

-Frank

[Draigr]

Haha! Thanks guys. And yes. I picked it up on Thursday, did a tutorial, and started scene production proper on Friday. Was rendering and tweaking all through the weekend.

The problem appears to have been associated with the cloud optimisation settings, I tested on all the others, switching through GI, raytracing and detail stuff, but that was the one that fixed it.

Of course, it increased render times by several orders of magnitude, but did fix the problem. A pity it didn't increase the actual image quality much.

So thanks to DandelO, you got the diagnosis right. Though Henry was right, GI surface stuff should have been right.

Now to tinker with this lovely program and do sweetness. I love how it's so easy to fudge with careful sun positioning and colour settings across the board . This picture really isn't all that good, I just know where to put stuff and how to fake things given limited resources.

That and the haze settings helped a lot....

[Oshyan]

Glad to hear it did end up being fixed by reduction in the Acceleration Cache as that's what I would have recommended, and the other suggestions seemed for a moment to be working, much to my surprise.

If you don't already have Raytrace Atmosphere enabled, I would recommend turning it on, then set Antialiasing to 3 or 4, atmosphere samples to no more than 32, and cloud samples at no more than 64 (regardless of "quality" setting), and less than that if samples are lower when quality is set to 1. See what that does to your render time and quality.

- Oshyan

[Draigr]

Wow! A Planetside dev got in on this! Awesome!

Also, thanks for the tips, I used the settings you recommended and managed to bump the render size up significantly without any decrease in quality or time.

Here's the render. Took about 3 and 1/2 hours or thereabouts.

On that note. Anybody got any thoughts on the picture, I feel like I could improve it a lot, but don't know enough about the program to do much.

Also. All my terrain options have mysteriously disappeared, completely. I can see em in the nodes window, but the side options is completely blank. Additionally, I seem to have misplaced to options that modified the colour of the terrain.

Is this normal?

I have two planets not activated or being viewed currently apart from the one you can see in the corner btw.

[rcallicotte]

Is it possible one of your nodes is disconnected or disabled and you don't see it?  What about the possibility that some of your terrain nodes are not on the planet you planned to change?

[Draigr]

Well, if I deselected the main planet, which given that the shaders tab is showing planet 4 (in the sky) is a good possibility, how do I got back to the main one?