Sharing my first image...

[BliND123]

Hello, just thought I'd share something I am rendering right now...first image from Terragen I am posting anywhere.  Just something simple, haven't really read any tutorials except on how to get a star picture in the background, other stuff I just got by playing around with the program.  I know its hard to tell but the big planet on the bottom is supposed to only be water right now with clouds over it, but it looks more like its covered in trees lol, but like I said it was just by playing around with what I could figure out.  I found out about this program a while back when I first started seeing wallpapers created in this on DeviantArt and I just thought I could try to create my own.  I was trying to search the forums on the best/fastest way to render a good image (as you can see, my little pixelated image has taken over an hour already) but couldn't really find a topic just for that, big problem is rendering times....I saw a lot of topics on rendering farms and such, is that like the PS3's Folding@Home thing that connects PCs to render over the internet or is it only PCs on a network?

Edit:  And here it is after 1 hour and 17 minutes.

[Luminos]

Folding@home is a distributed computing (DC) project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics (MD). The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."

"Stolen" from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

So, unforutunatly your not really to get a render farm out of that, or anything like it. You wont get real time renders with this program because most real times use rasterization, although with recent developments a card that runs along side your graphics card has boasted it will speed ray-tracing renders up by 2000% (http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/03/computer-graphics-rendering.html).

For stars I put a starmap on the Background shader. You can do this by getting a star image (larger the better) and then go to
Objects Tab -> Background -> Surface Shaders -> "..." -> Create New Shader -> Other Surface Shader -> Default Shader

From there click the elipsis again and "Go to "Default Shader 01".  From there add your starmap into the Luminosity Image and Translucency Image, Play around with  the Luminosity Slider untill you get the effect you want.

[PG]

Luminos is right, Folding@home works through packets which are sent by a central server to users around the world then results are sent back. TG2's networking (not yet implemented) is for computers on one local network.
However, I did make a topic, must be a year ago now, about using BOINC to allow a community render farm. Once the networking module is added to TG2 it will be possible to do this although there wasn't a massive surge in support for the idea. Don't know why to be honest.
Here's the topic anyhow
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4929.0

[Luminos]

Instead of bumping the old thread ill post here, but I just read your topic and this would be an excellent idea, but it sounds like a feature that would be implemented at a later date. I'm sure people would be alot happier with faster rendering times. I know I would. But then I would need something complicated enough to take that long *cough* Mohawk *cough*

[Mohawk20]

Just stay away from reflective shaders and water and you'll be fine 

[neuspadrin]

no offense but an hour is nothing...  my longest render was 6 and a half days for an image, but that was before multicore support and i didn't bother splitting it up between my cores.

most final renders now generally take between 12hours-day n half or so for me, which im fine with.

the distributed free tg2 renderfarm idea is kinda cool though.

[Zylot]

This is correct, with TG2 (and especially on older machines like mine) the render times skyrocket.  It's a good day (or a test render) if I finish anything in an hour.

[BliND123]

Well, how fast should I be able to render this image on my system?  I have AMD Athalon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ 2.59GHz, 2GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT XXX 256MB, Windows Vista Home Premium 32-Bit (not sure if the system matters). 

I tried to render the same image again and mess with the priority on Windows Take Manager and set it to Realtime, my system I think froze in like 10 seconds.   I thought I saw a thread a few days ago on best settings to render faster with but am unable to find it.  I love the images that can be created with this but don't have the patience to wait days for something that might not be as good as I thought it would be, lol.  Messing with the same image again but took off the clouds I here is where its currently at rendering.

[PG]

Try doing Oshyan's Benchmark test, that'll show you how your system copes with TG2 compared to other people's systems.
You have to register before you have access to upload your time.
http://www.3dspeedmachine.com/?page=3&scene=40

[BliND123]

Do you all get errors when opening that scene from Oshyan's Benchmark?

[cyphyr]

yes you will get some errors as the scene was created in a version of TG that we don't have access to (yet, maybe ), however this dose not effect the validity of the benchmark.
richard

[Zylot]

If yer not sure if a scene will look good, that's what the quick (test) render and preview windows are for.

[BliND123]

I don't know if I am using the wrong settings (left it all on default just set the subdiv cache up to 1000) or what but even the quick render is a little to pixelated to judge whether I should wait a few hours/days to create the final render.

[cyphyr]

I'm very intrigued by the texture of your distant planet, how was this achieved, it looks like brush strokes almost
richard

[Zylot]

There is an odd crease running along the horizon though...


in fact, the stars look a bit odd and the quality of the render is pretty low.

Yet is appears to take over an hour?   I am very interested in viewing the .TGD file, or at least knowing the samples of ATMO, the GI and AA settings, and quality setting for the render.  Something seems off.