Rendering Old Terragen Projects

Started by WAS, June 25, 2021, 02:28:37 PM

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WAS

I am curious is a breakdown of what sort of features that could be overlooked that would roll-over to TG as legacy and provide interesting results with the renderer?

For example, this old project I have changed from legacy to robust sampler, and defaulted the PT settings I used, but I noticed it was really bright, and noisy. So I tried SR but it's similar result, kinda low quality for 0.6 MPD and 6 AA at 720p. But also I notice it's rendering the terrain black, before the textures render in. So I'm wondering if there are other settings hidden away, or within shaders I may be missing what would prevent an older scene from benefitting fully from new TG versions???

Help from support would be wonderful here. I can also send the project if need be (though this is the Park Sidewalk project I shared here). What are the biggest changes between 4.3.23.0 and 4.4.x or even older projects that would be of importance to change to benefit?

PS the black terrain is actually painted black, you can see 'faint' texturing, or depth, or something before the actual shaders render in. Never seen this behavior before.

PPS if trying to track down everything that could be considered using "legacy" features too complicated to do project by project, perhaps a feature within Terragen to update to the latest features/dropdowns could be added?

Dune

Older projects often lack the defer all, so you have to check that manually. That's just the one thing I noticed when opening old files. And it may render opacitated-out water as black, eg. which was the first thing I thought when seeing this.

WAS

I thought water, but the water in the lake is there, and the lake is a small disc stretched just enough to fit the pond. This blackness follows the displacement of the shores and such above the water (even the little islands in the pond).

When I added a second plane though for some rocks near the path, it was rendering the whole plane first before the terrain over it (similar to how lateral displacement took a long time cause of the way it was handled at distance and rendering distant terrain and disp behind cliffs.

Thanks for the tip on defer all, that is probably off.

Dune

Quote from: WAS on June 26, 2021, 12:40:07 PMit was rendering the whole plane first before the terrain over it
Yes, that's exactly what defer all prevents.