Update a let-down?

[moodflow]

I think speeding up rendering times would really bring the product up to its real potential (even at the expense of extra features at this point).  That way, we could take advantage of what we have right now.  Otherwise, the product is really only a preview as stated.

For instance, I have a few scene files I've spent WEEKS of daily work building.  To further my rendering addiction, I bought 2 more 3.0 GHz dual core PCs, and set them to render one of these scenes (4 instances of TG2 with 1/8 crops, 1024x768 render, 0.8 quality).  It took over 203 hours for each 1/8 slice.  Thats horrid!   So this is 1/2 of an image (which I assembled in photoshop).  Not to mention, the image still had noticeable grain in certain areas and is definitely not "ready" for prime time.  I was quite frustrated, and even considered taking a long break from TGTP after this.  I decided not to, since I still have fun researching and building clip files.

I started another image a few days ago at 640x480, on the 2 dual core PCs.  Quality is at .6 and I am doing 1/4 slices.  Its STILL rendering, and only about 50% complete.  It looks incredible, but geez, these render times are pretty bad.  I figured it would be done overnight, as this was just a "preview" image.

So most definitely, lets see some work on render times now.  Even having multiple dual core PCs is not enough at this point.

I think water transparency should also get priority as this would really open the doors to new scenes.

I purchased the Deep + animation version with the expectation that new features, optimizations, and bug fixes would be coming out regularly, so thats why I am so impatient.  Otherwise, I am very excited about the possibilities of this application, which is what is contributing to the frustration!   

However, I do appreciate Planetside's staying in touch with its users.  Thank you.

[efflux]

I'm quite happy with the way things are going. Planetside are a small company and it will take them time. It has to stay this way because TG2 is not going to have a gigantic userbase. Otherwise Planetside could probably have a bigger team churning the app out and probably getting it wrong anyway. It's actually best kept small. If mistakes are made now in favour of speeding up releases then we'll end up with more problems. Problems I know only too well from other apps with big dreams and no realism as to finances and how people would actually use the app.

As for render times, yes they are long as any app like this would be. Yes it's a pain to watch TG rendering stuff not even in your final render. Optimization would be great and it's something I'm really looking forward to. However it's not that bad. I have a 2880 x 1440 going at the moment with GI and specular highlights. It's going to finish at over 15 hours on a P4 3.0 GHz and no way could I have created this picture in any other app. For render times it's crucial to experiment with the settings to take them down as low as you can get away with.

[DeathTwister]

Hay Oshyan and the rest of you guys,

  Well it is good they are getting ready for another update, and the water in important as well as many other features people are talking about, hope they have waves in there as well as the transparency issues.  But I have a huge problem with models right now.

Now making models smoother, although that will be awesome and looking forward to it. I am so very frustrated with the 16 texture rule on models right now.  Most my good models have 40-80+ textures on them for the big models like some of my huge Ship, space ships, stations, castles and so on.  When are they going to have more textures per model? I know they say it will be there at the end, but........It is almost imposable to bring models in if we cannot have more then just 16 textures, and seems very dumb to me and somehow very short sighted.  There is so much I could do if I could get half my models into tgd2.

  Someone suggested that I could bring them in as pieces and put them together in tgd2, Oh sure, with bounding boxes that does not allow us to see any mesh, so how we going to match up intricate models that we can't see, sure. I have to admit I did try it once, and said very quickly forget it.

  Now I try and make models with 16 textures, but that is so limiting as to me downright breaks my heart, so I give up lots of times and go on to other programs that I have to work in.

Any idea when that is going to get fixed? and I hope have up to 120 textures per model at least.  This is not video game engine stuff as PlanetSide has stated, this is Film stuff that is and are very important needs I think, so I am asking now since this looks like a good place for it.

  Anyway I do love this program and plan to buy it for my birthday on Dec 6th, unless PlanetSide wants to give me a copy for my birthday hahahahaha, I will have the full version then.  Then I will yell and holler if I have needs not met after I pay the duckets lolol, but until then I am good.  When we getting more textures per model. I am also surprised that more modelers are not complaining more, unless there are not many that use tgd2? that would seem odd to me if that was the case considering everything.
When is the next release date?

DT

[rcallicotte]

"...and no way could I have created this picture in any other app." - efflux

Hats off to this.

[DeathTwister]

Hay Calico,

where is the pic brother? but I hear ya. Here is a good example of some models that have 17 textures, I did manage to double one up in the mapping:


Now this is a very simple example of my needs to come, I make 80% of all my own models, and maybe 10-20% I will buy if they are exact replicas of historical models, or mundania modeling.  I make the spacy and cool stuff, or stuff no one has made yet, so to have this feature with texturing is so very important to upcoming projects as I am getting ready to create a animay film using tgd2, that is if I can get a few of my needs met sometime soon. And texturing along with water transparencies and waves are very important by the time of the full release, which I doubt will be by the end of the year, no offence PlanetSide, but you all moving slow as it is /winks, not that I mind, have not bought the full version yet, so it is giving me time hahaha to get my end together.

Also add a request from me.  How about particles so we can have smoke, and other special effects for modeling like smoke coming out of the smoke stack as a good example, as it is I have to photoshop that in if I want to for a single shot, not good for film, not good at all.

DT

[Oshyan]

DT, we're well aware of the limitations on textures per model. Quite frankly model-related issues are not our biggest priority in general. Terragen is first and foremost a landscape rendering system. Object rendering is useful to serve the purpose of realistic landscapes for vegetation, rocks, etc. and that is its primary intended purpose. For that use the current limitations are not generally a problem (few vegetation models have greater than 16 textures). That is not to say we don't care to support more textures, just that it is not a top priority given the uses the product is generally intended for.

Realistically TG2's model rendering and handling capabilities will never be up to the standard of other modeling-specific applications like 3DS Max, Maya, etc. and so we do expect people to focus more on integration workflows in cases where sophisticated object rendering, animation, dynamics, etc. are called for. The tools to allow that are currently not very fleshed out, but already many people have achieved good results in their integration projects, on a professional as well as hobbyist level. This may be something to look into, though I grant it may be a more cumbersome approach than you would like as a hobbyist artist. Then again I know you already work with many different applications and it is important to know how to effectively integrate them all.

Moodflow, I certainly see your point and it's perfectly valid. Hopefully it will be enough to know that performance is a large part of the next big development priority which is a major renderer overhaul. By the time you see the next major release performance should be notably improved. I have to say though that it sounds like you're running into some particularly extreme render times. Perhaps it is the specifics of your scenes (lots of reflections or heavy displacement), or just your detail settings, but I do wonder if there is a way to reduce render time will maintaining the quality and results you're aiming for. Taking a look at specific scenes and settings would tell us for sure.

Edit: we do not plan to add a particle system in the near future. Certainly not for the initial TG2 release. I think you will find that no other landscape rendering applications have such a feature either. Again this may be an area where integration with other applications is a better path to pursue.

- Oshyan

[DeathTwister]

Hay oshyan,

DT, we're well aware of the limitations on textures per model. Quite frankly model-related issues are not our biggest priority in general. Terragen is first and foremost a landscape rendering system. Object rendering is useful to serve the purpose of realistic landscapes for vegetation, rocks, etc. and that is its primary intended purpose. For that use the current limitations are not generally a problem (few vegetation models have greater than 16 textures). That is not to say we don't care to support more textures, just that it is not a top priority given the uses the product is generally intended for.

I understand that brother, but this app has much more then just a nice terrain, make a few flowers and pin it up on the wall kinda feeling.  It has major potential for making Film, and many more things.  And I can think of a few plants off hand that would have more then 16 textures, but again, not the issue I think.  What is important I think is to be able to allow artists to take it far ferther then you guys may intend it to be. I could use multi sub mapping, but again tgd2 does not support that kind of mapping, so somewhere in there has to be a simple half way point for all of us.

  Now I am not a programmer, but isn't it all you have to do is just add more fields to add textures to? it does not look like rocket science to me to get more textures into tgd2 really, in fact it should be I would think fairly easy to add to, or am I way wrong and missing the magic of programmers somewhere? Not trying to bug anyone, but this issue has me bugged bad.

  I remember once you told me Oshyan that Vue was very limiting and tgd2 was so much more then Vue could ever be, except for Vue 6 maybe.

  Well does that mean I have to go back to Vue to create what I want? I really do not like the way they do allot of things in the App Vue, except for the mapping maybe and a few other things that I like about Vue, that is cool, it takes in as many textures as I can think up, so am happy there, but not really happy as it does not hold a candle in the wind like tgd2 does, so now I am in a quandry brother, how to get my needs met.  all I need is more textures and I can just get bigger comps to render stuff out, that is why God made rendering Farms, no biggie to me there.  I got used to Bryce long time ago, and tgd2 is much faster then Bryce So I have no complaints there really, I know it will get streamlined yet by the end and release.

Edit: we do not plan to add a particle system in the near future. Certainly not for the initial TG2 release. I think you will find that no other landscape rendering applications have such a feature either. Again this may be an area where integration with other applications is a better path to pursue.

Well didn't expect to much on that, and when plugins come that is a good plugin to look for I give you that.  Now if I could export the terrains to other apps and still have the over hangs and the terrain as we make them with the shaders, sure that would be just fine, if I could do that, are you planning in the final release to be able to export out those wonderful terrains? and the texturing and mapping to other apps like Max, XSI, LW and other programs? I would hate to end up back in Vue after all this, and WOW what a wonderful program I think tgd2 is also so would be a huge shame to me to see it not go all the way like I see that it can with ease I might add.

But Water and Textures in modeling are the biggies for me right now and I think could be most important thing for me when the day is done right now with tgd2 Preview.  So when is the next release again? did you release it? or are we just talking? /chuckles......

Thanks for the quick responce brother Oshyan.

DT

[moodflow]

Oshyan,

Yes, I just like pushing the envelope and making rendering computers cry for mercy...   

First off, I don't want to give you guys the wrong idea here, so let me let you guys know my feelings about TG2:  This application is the best damn terrain creator out there right now!  No other application can touch it.  I am really excited at the possibilities, and just get frustrated that it isn't to the level I need it at this time, knowing that it has all this 'untapped' power.  I know that day will come, but still get frustrated at the render times, thats all.

I know Planetside is a small team with limits as such, but they are sitting on a gold mine, especially if/when they get TG2 up to speed.   Its kinda like waiting for Christmas gifts for me.  Even though I'm all grow'd up now, I am still a kid on the inside!  I want my presents...   

I am going to have Volker check out one of the files.  You are more than welcome as well, just send me a PM, and I'll send you the link to the zip file.  I haven't posted it yet, but its likely a few hundred MBs.

Many thanks,
Jeffro (moodflow)

[jo]

Hi Bertrand,

Thanks old_blaggard. Yep, I've seen some of the workarounds. I might give them a go. Although I wonder about memory requirements. All I have to play with are two gigs. Presumably four instances of Terragen2 rendering at the same time would require 4x the memory... Which would make it inpractical.

Every modern desktop operating system has virtual memory, where information which doesn't fit into RAM is written out onto the hard drive. You are not limited to how much RAM you have. If you have less RAM then the OS will start using virtual memory sooner, which will be slower but will still allow things to run. If you have more RAM then the OS will able to use RAM more and that will be faster.

The limitation is the address space each running instance of an application has. This is the amount of memory "slots" an application can access. On 32 bit Windows the address space is usually 2 GB. On 32 bit OS X it seems to vary a bit, but is around 3 GB. That is the only limitation on memory use.  On 64 bit versions of the OS the address space is absolutely huge, but an application needs to be 64 bit to take advantage of it. TG2 will have a 64 bit version at some point.

You can run four instances of TG2 if you like, the only issue may be that rendering slows down because there will be a lot of virtual memory in use, and therefore the hard drive will be being accessed frequently, which isn't fast. It is something like 10,000 times slower to access information on the hard drive than it is to access it in RAM. That doesn't mean rendering will be 10,000 times slower mind you :-), but it will be slower.

Regards,

Jo

[jo]

Hi,

Now I am not a programmer, but isn't it all you have to do is just add more fields to add textures to? it does not look like rocket science to me to get more textures into tgd2 really, in fact it should be I would think fairly easy to add to, or am I way wrong and missing the magic of programmers somewhere? Not trying to bug anyone, but this issue has me bugged bad.

I think the particular problem here is really that the node system doesn't allow adding inputs on the fly. Last time we upped the texture count Matt went in and manually added more inputs. What we need to do is modify the node system so it can handle adding inputs on the fly, and then we can, for example, add as many textures as needed. We haven't had an opportunity to look into this yet though.

Regards,

Jo

[jo]

Hi,

I would just like to say that multithreading the renderer etc. is not a trivial undertaking. To a large extent we have been fixing bugs and adding some features because once we start on the multithreading we will very likely not be able to make new releases until it is finished, which could be a little while. We are trying to clear the decks a bit, before we get stuck in. A lot of the bugs which are fixed are not insignificant and took some tracking down. We will still be working on other aspects while the multithreading is underway, so there should be more than just multithreading in place when the first version with that is released.

Regards,

Jo

[moodflow]

Jo,

Many thanks for keeping us updated on this.   Its good to hear from the developers on a current status.

[DeathTwister]

Wow thanks very much for getting back to us Jo.

I think the particular problem here is really that the node system doesn't allow adding inputs on the fly. Last time we upped the texture count Matt went in and manually added more inputs. What we need to do is modify the node system so it can handle adding inputs on the fly, and then we can, for example, add as many textures as needed. We haven't had an opportunity to look into this yet though.

Thanks you so very much for an answer.  I knew you guys were working on it, and it is very good to know that you are looking into it and planning to add more down the road.  That is good enough for me.  As an artist I very much like where tgd2 Preview is at.  I know that many things are forthcoming and we all just have to calm our jets as it were.  I believe that this is all worth it, and thank PlanetSide so much for talking with us and giving us strait answers that we need to hear, or not depending on what is being asked.  Thanks a ton Jo, your on my Favs list /winks.  Your the man and thanks for listening to this artist and getting back to me and others in this posting.

I have been learning the Node system is everything in tgd2, yep yep awesome crafting boys. I guess your way to busy to give an eta on more textures? Thought to ask is all, don't have to answer, I know you will get to it.  I have models backed up around the block waiting to go into tgd2 and kick this off like nothing I have ever been able to do until tgd2 came out. The Art, the Film, and hopefully later the Video Games engines we will be able to make and build as exporting becomes more developed down the road.

DT

[Matt]

Someone has a lot to do in 4 months for a final release to come out in 2007, and will that even have water transparency?

Yes, water transparency will certainly be available before the end of 2007. Multi-threading development is happening right now, although it will not be in this month's update.

Matt

[Harvey Birdman]

Jo,

Many thanks for keeping us updated on this.   Its good to hear from the developers on a current status.

I'll second this. Thanks for the update on the update, guys.