Spinner

[Markal]

My 4 year old intell quad core HP crashed...not the power supply...something on the board...hard drive survived thank goodness. Purchased the new Intel i5 quad core and this baby screams. This image rendered with high quality settings .8 detail and 8 AA with GI relative detail and quaility at 4 and super sample prepass on....1600 X 1000  in 6 hours. Only postwork was contrast and sharpening. Had to re-install TG2 latest version as windows 7 didn't recognize it on the old hard drive...I'm thinking OS's still have a hard time with conversion from 32 bit to 64 bit systems...I'm not sure about Win 7... Vista seems better to me ...What OS works best with TG?
Moodflows starfield background
TBH rings by "The BlackHole"
Thanks!

[Oshyan]

Quite a nice image. I like the rocky ring in the background and the foreground texturing especially.

Congrats on the new system, however I think you are perhaps making the error of turning up settings on new hardware unnecessarily. For this scene, detail 0.8 may be ok, but 0.75 or even 0.7 would probably be fine. More importantly, AA8 is almost certainly unnecessary as AA is much more important for objects (especially vegetation) and not so much for terrain. AA 4 or at most 6 should be fine for this scene, especially since you appear to be adding sharpening in post processing. GI 4/4 is really quite high as well, especially with the higher detail setting. Your shadows are not terribly complicated here. I would say GI 2/4 should be good. That should cut your render time perhaps in half if you lower settings as I suggest, and quality should be similar.

Again, nice work.

- Oshyan

[Markal]

Thanks Oshyan,
I thought that AA was for curves or smoothing edges...as with planets (objects)...the edges of planets or moons seem rougher when I lower the AA value. Maybe I'm wrong...I dunno?  Still 6 hrs seems like nothing to me as many of my other renders were 48hrs or longer....yeah!!! I'm still learning and I'm thankful for any help!
Thanks
Mark

[Oshyan]

Yes, AA will help with any sharp edges, it's just that terrain tends to not have the kind of edges that need high AA. Sometimes it is more necessary than others, of course. In your case the rocks in the planetary ring might actually justify use of AA8, but you should test it with crop renders. And remember that whenever you use post sharpening, you're basically canceling out some of the effect of higher AA, so if you plan to sharpen anyway, you might use less AA. Perhaps AA 6 with a bit less sharpening would give a similar result.

In any case adjusting the other settings, even without changing AA, should still give you even faster rendering. Enjoy the new machine! Perhaps now you can do an animation even.

- Oshyan

[inkydigit]

another classy scifi scene Mark!
glad your hd was saved, and the new processor does the trick!
J

[TheBadger]

I like the ring very much. The image as a whole is very good too!