Help tune my TG4 easy cloud render

Started by mdharrington, September 14, 2016, 07:04:45 PM

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mdharrington

Was setting up some base clouds for an animation I would like to do, unfortunately a 1080p render was costing me 2.5hrs on a six core i7.

Now I was enacting 2d shadow maps, and voxel acceleration...but on restart I got a popup saying they are not available in the creative version...so I guess these are out.

If anybody feels like a challenge...feel free to take a look, and let me know what I could do to significantly improve the render times.
The scene is just a simple easy cloud setup and a cube, the cube is a standin for a future 3d model on realistic proportions....hence the clouds are relatively short...and as such I had to increase density and coverage a bit
Perhaps this is not a good situation for easy clouds? Maybe I should go back to old style setup?

Thanks

Oshyan

Some quick thoughts: You've got Defer Atmo enabled (as it is by default in TG4), so you should not need such high atmo samples (32). You can turn that down to 16. You don't need Soft Shadows unless you've got shadows falling from objects onto objects, clouds are basically soft shadowed by default.

You can also use more highly adaptive AA with a low noise threshold, go to Edit Sampling, enable Customize Sampling, and you can set First Sampling Level to something more like 1/16 or 1/64, then the noise threshold down to 0.025 or even 0.015 (the lower the number, the less noise, but the longer the render). This lets the renderer use fewer samples where they're less necessary (mostly darker/less contrasty areas), and save time, while still using higher samples where needed. If you're going to animate this you may need to tweak the adaptivity differently though. Also if you're animating, you'll need to use the animation options for Cloud GI in the GI Settings window.

Anyway those things should help you cut down the render time a bit while maintaining quality.

- Oshyan

mdharrington


Matt

TG4 Creative Edition should support those features that it warned you about. If it doesn't, that's a bug I need to fix as soon as possible! It might explain the long render times too.

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

mdharrington

ill check ASAP....

I think it was initially working, but was disabled on restart...and greyed out

mdharrington

[attachimg=1]

I was able to enable 2d shadow buffer, but on restart got this...

Voxel buffer is fully greyed out, couldn't enable it at all...although a few days ago I could


Matt

We're going to a release a fix for this in the next day or two.

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.