Raytrace Everything usefullness?

[digitalis99]

I was doing some experiments trying to shorten some render times prior to sending several large jobs to the farm, so I did a test with RTE enabled.  It definitely improved render times (shortened from ~2hrs. to 1.3hrs. for my scene), but the resultant image is horrible.  Here's a crop with RTE off:
[attachthumb=#]

Here's the same scene and frame with RTE on:
[attachthumb=#]

Ouch!  Is there a good reason why massive amounts of image detail are simply erased from the scene?  I'd almost think it actually modifies the terrain by looking at the stuff in the distance.

What situation is it considered a good idea to enable RTE?  I thought this scene would be a no-brainer given the lack of atmospheric effects, but I'm obviously wrong.

[Tangled-Universe]

Check this link:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=12361.msg125270#msg125270

If you want to know more then search for 'ray detail multiplier'.

Cheers,
Martin

[rcallicotte]

Animations might not suffer so much from Ray Tracing if the camera is moving.  And lighting matters - this affects the detail.  And, of course, detail settings.

[dandelO]

Very detailed post by Matt on TG's raytrace options; http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=8300.0

[Oshyan]

The lower detail is due to a lower default "ray detail" vs. main detail, which essentially makes the raytracer operate at 1/4 of the main detail (a performance optimization that usually pays off well, but can cause issues as shown here). If you increased main detail to 4, you'd get equivalent detail to 1 for non-raytraced terrain (and of course massively increase render time). So the reality is the raytracer is much slower than the micropoly renderer when rendering terrain and *for equivalent levels of detail*.

- Oshyan