Scene ain't working.... again.

[Draigr]

No?



Playtime aside, I'm trying to optimise the rendering on the image by working out where the noise is coming from, most of the quality settings are middling except detail. AA on 4. Too much AA increases time well beyond what I'll put up with before a complete render.

Clouds are also an issue, they're quite grainy and I think those telltale 'render broke' squares are showing up again, but I know how to fix them.

Any comments on the terrain and/or the rest of the scene would be appreciated.

Also. I'm absolutely loving the colour picker and being able to input 8gigs of ram is wonderful. This image marks my first time figuring out how terrain works. I got the order in the nodes list wrong, so before this, none of the things I'd be telling it to would work. Now they do!

[domdib]

Have you checked this thread: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=6442.0 on render settings?

[Oshyan]

What exactly are your render and cloud/atmosphere sample settings and are you using Raytrace Atmosphere?

- Oshyan

[Draigr]

Yes, I've been through that thread. In fact it was one of the first I read when I started terragen a coupla weeks ago. I've been testing out the various render settings, but I do have limits associated with time, as it increases exponentially with some of them.

Here's the latest render, try to ignore the blocks. I know how to fix that, but as before, it's time consuming.



I've attached the file for your checking. It's not complex.

The settings for the main Altocumulus layer are: 3D Volumetric, .76 quality, 77 samples.
Cirrus: 2D, .48, 5 samples
Atmosphere: 41 samples

Current render has a detail setting of .24 and AA of 6.

Yes. Ray trace atmosphere and objects are checked, but not ray trace everything. Neither is GI Surface details. It renders with 10 cores, and 8000 mb in the subdivide cache. Renders are getting to an hour or two for just the cloud layer. Fixing the blockiness will boost it even higher, probably by an hour by my experience. Which isn't much.

Also. You'll note that the cloud layer has a strange effect on the right hand side. It litterally planes off horizontally, while the left is all lovely and puffy on the underside. What's causing this?

The base wispiness and base softness settings are sitting at .79 and .76 respectively. That isn't a separate cloud layer, it's the same one. The density fractal uses Perlin Billows.

[freelancah]

Acceleration cache in the clouds usually causes those kind of tile errors

[Oshyan]

Taking a look now. I think there may be room for optimization/improvement here.

- Oshyan

[Oshyan]

Well, my settings increase render time but get rid of the blocks and it's pretty noise-free. 1 hour 30 minutes, result attached. Still well under 2 hours with 8 cores (i7 920). I only used a 1600MB cache. 8000MB is completely unnecessary for this scene.

- Oshyan

[Ratchet66]

I have the same blocks appearing on my final render.How did you remove them?Did you just boost the detail?

[Draigr]

If you go to the optimisation tab in the cloud settings, you'll find a dropdown for optimisation, decrease it a level or two, so there's less acceleration.

Thanks for the help guys!

Wow, Oshyan, those quality settings are high! I thought you didn't need to go that high most of the time! The clouds aren't that complex are they?

Nice to see that a full render takes only an hour and a half, and about 25 to 30 mins without clouds.

Any ideas on how to fix that little horizontal bottom of the clouds thing that's happening in the scene. I suppose I could reseed the clouds, but that's actually not the first time I've seen it. It's been happening on previous revisions, I'm just the most happy with the current one because of those lovely clouds on the left.

Also, I'd like to boost this particular scene up to a gallery quality piece. I'm getting an 'incomplete' vibe from it, and anytime I get that vibe it means something's missing.

Check the picture for the latest update. 1 hour 40 which isn't bad by my calculations. Still, not happy with the planed clouds and the terrain's getting closer but not entirely there...

I've tried to add water, but if you look at the file, you'll find that doesn't work. Also, terragen crashes if you move the water to this part of the planet. Oshyan, you might want to look that that. Just go to the lake, and grab some co-ordinates from the scene, then move the lake to them. Terragen immediately crashes. It crashes with anything over 5000 in lake size.

Under that is fine, but the lake is on an angle, and can't be rotated round...

I'd like to see what water does to the scene, but I already know it won't be enough. Likely we're looking at foliage and better rock formations, although I'm still at the 'press everything till it works' stage.

[Draigr]

Whelp, new update. Water bug is still there and the scene's still too dark and the clouds ain't makin' any light.

So... Help?

[jaf]

Have you tried messing with the environmental lighting or Gamma on the Render|Effects tab?

[Draigr]

Yes, yes I have. It's just hard to tell whether the gamma settings worked or just blew the colours out unless I wait for around 1:30. Even a cropped render takes a while.

Environmental lights are already tripled. The largest issue is that it blows up the sparkles in the mountains, which, while looking nice now, dominate the image when taken too far.

I'm also noticing some really nasty terrain spikes and noise. I'm not sure how to fix it either. One of the latest files is attached for your perusal.


If one of the developers spots this thread. Try moving the lake from where it currently is to the place in the scene. You'll crash the program immediately unless you decrease the size to under 5K. You may want to consider putting an intercept in the programming to catch that and warn users before the code runs through. It's a fatal bug. It crashes without exception.

Yes, this is on the curve of the planet, I went into space and returned, but not at the same spot.

[Tangled-Universe]

That's a pretty weird scene if you look at the camera position?

xyz: 3.35558e+006, -1.09496e+006, 1.24026e+006

The camera is 1094km below the origin (coordinates 0, 0, 0) , also, it's 3355km and 1240km away from the origin.

All in all. You'r probably asking for troubles anyway when working this way.
Stick as close as possible to the origin with your work.

Yes, yes I have. It's just hard to tell whether the gamma settings worked or just blew the colours out unless I wait for around 1:30. Even a cropped render takes a while.

Your scene has 3 cloud layers, huge scales, GI 2/2 and raytraced atmosphere with huge amount of samples in some atmosphere elements. All in all that's likely to make it a slow render.

Environmental lights are already tripled. The largest issue is that it blows up the sparkles in the mountains, which, while looking nice now, dominate the image when taken too far.

Hmmm...GI @ 7...with a setting this high you can't predict at all anymore how your chosen colour really would look like in your scene.
If you want to brighten up your scene you basically should choose to increase camera exposure and save in EXR to post-process it in HDR.

I'm also noticing some really nasty terrain spikes and noise. I'm not sure how to fix it either. One of the latest files is attached for your perusal.

The last surface shader 02 is being fed with a 5m powerfractal with ~2m displacement. That might be the cause of the spikes.

If one of the developers spots this thread. Try moving the lake from where it currently is to the place in the scene. You'll crash the program immediately unless you decrease the size to under 5K. You may want to consider putting an intercept in the programming to catch that and warn users before the code runs through. It's a fatal bug. It crashes without exception.

I tried to reproduce this by copying the coordinates from the preview and paste them as coordinates for the lake objects. The boundary box is tilted, suggesting that you are too far away from the origin. The further away from the origin the less the lake object is able to follow the curvature of your planet.

After re-enabling the preview-render it indeed crashes. I think this could indeed be a bug, but like you may have understood now you're really asking for trouble anyway

Yes, this is on the curve of the planet, I went into space and returned, but not at the same spot.

That's exactly the thing I tried to point out at the top. The further away from the origin you create your scene, the more likely you'll run into problems due to internal inaccuracies.


Well, I think this is the first time ever I'm saying this: forget the water and stuff, move on to something new

Cheers,
Martin

[cyphyr]

A thought, maybe helpful, maybe not. If you like your viewpoint as it is you can move it closer to the origin (as TU correctly suggests) by adding a transform shader between the last Terrain shader and the Compute terrain. Re-positioning the sun and camera will replicate your scene with hopefully some of your issued resolved. Agree with all TU's suggestions as well.
Richard