Impact Mountain

Primalace · February 25, 2010, 06:37:54 PM

Hi everyone,

This is my first post to the image boards. I want to get some critique on this render. I didn't have an idea in mind when I started making this but I like how it started to look so I developed it into what you see now. Any advice or ideas would be really appreciated as I'm only just getting to grips with Terragen at the moment.

Cheers
-Mike

Dune · February 26, 2010, 02:56:25 AM

Hi Primalace,

Welcome to the forum, and from this first post I gather you'll get there (wherever that is) real fast. It's a great start! I'd add some trees and bush, there's plenty available for free if you look around in the forum. Keep up the good work.

---Dune

Tangled-Universe · February 26, 2010, 07:29:06 AM

Welcome!
Dune said it all already, looks really promising and some extra bushes etc. would be great.
An often made mistake is the scales of the water. In this case, to serve the scales of the image, I'd decrease the wave size. Say by about 4 times or so.
Anyhow, keep up the good work indeed

Cheers,
Martin

choronr · February 26, 2010, 11:32:22 PM

Welcome to you. And from the looks of your image, you are well on your way. Yes, adding some vegetation; also, playing with the lighting position and atmosphere could reveal some interesting variations ...keep on!

Primalace · March 06, 2010, 09:25:31 AM

Ok, so I found some time to work on this a little bit more. I've followed the advice given and I'm liking the improvement. I tried to use some vegetation but I couldn't get it to look right. The scale of the picture made using grass populations or what not a bit pointless as you wouldn't really see them in detail anyway. I'm curious as to whether you could fake bush/grass like look with just displacements. I remember doing something similar to make fake trees in the first Terragen.

Any advice would be much appreciated.
-Mike

inkydigit · March 08, 2010, 05:19:44 AM

nice update!

Tangled-Universe · March 08, 2010, 05:47:45 AM

This looks very nice already

Are you planning to work more on this, or move on to something else?
Anyhow, looking forward to see your next iteration/work.

Martin

Primalace · March 08, 2010, 03:17:22 PM

I've worked some more on this, mainly with adding a snow covered mountain in the background where the flat topped one is now. Though I'm having a serious problem rendering it. It seems every time I try to render the scene at an arbitrary time during the render my pc will just reboot automatically. I'm thinking it might be an issue with running out of memory but the picture isn't exactly large, nor is it really complicated plus I only have the detail set to 6 or 7. I have 2GB of ram, windows XP SP3 and a quad core processor running at 3 GHz per core. Any ideas? What number of threads should I be putting in the render settings? Its set on 8 at the moment.

Tangled-Universe · March 08, 2010, 03:37:19 PM

You can leave the thread settings at default or otherwise set the max threads to 4, since you have a quadcore.
If you increase the min thread to >4 threads you'll indeed create more threads, but also an overhead because you have only 4 cores.
This will slow down the render.

You mention detail settings of 6 and 7. I presume and hope you mean 0.6 and 0.7?
What are your other rendersettings, like detail, AA, GI and raytracing of atmosphere/clouds etc.?

2GB of RAM should be sufficient for an image like this, but it is not that much for heavier scenes (quality or resolution-wise).

Martin

Primalace · March 08, 2010, 03:47:32 PM

0.6 and 0.7 yes

AA is at 2, GI is at 1, 1 and 8. Raytracing is set to off on the atmosphere and clouds. It's set on for the shadows on the terrain. The clouds are only a 2d cirrus type so I doubt they're too memory intensive. The atmosphere has only 16 samples too.

It's happened quite a lot on numerous scenes. It seems once it crashes and reboots my computer I'll probably never get another render out of it without it doing the same. Plus sometimes it happens on my more complex scenes, and other times on the simplest as well. I've monitored my memory and CPU usage as its been rendering and when it crashes there is no spike or anything before the computer reboots. I just wish it wouldn't reboot so I can actually try and debug the issue.

Kadri · March 08, 2010, 03:49:31 PM

Quote from: Primalace on March 08, 2010, 03:17:22 PM
I've worked some more on this, mainly with adding a snow covered mountain in the background where the flat topped one is now. Though I'm having a serious problem rendering it. It seems every time I try to render the scene at an arbitrary time during the render my pc will just reboot automatically. I'm thinking it might be an issue with running out of memory but the picture isn't exactly large, nor is it really complicated plus I only have the detail set to 6 or 7. I have 2GB of ram, windows XP SP3 and a quad core processor running at 3 GHz per core. Any ideas? What number of threads should I be putting in the render settings? Its set on 8 at the moment.

Do you overclock your PC Primalace ? 3D rendering is very demanding on the pc.
If you do , you have to be sure it is stable .Otherwise don't overclock .

Kadri.

Primalace · March 08, 2010, 03:54:43 PM

You know what, I never even thought of that. I have overclocked, slightly. It must be restarting due to temperature, I never even thought of checking that! Is there a way to do application specific throttling of the CPU? Otherwise I'll just set it back to stock and hope it works out.

Tangled-Universe · March 08, 2010, 03:57:49 PM

Quote from: Primalace on March 08, 2010, 03:54:43 PM
You know what, I never even thought of that. I have overclocked, slightly. It must be restarting due to temperature, I never even thought of checking that! Is there a way to do application specific throttling of the CPU? Otherwise I'll just set it back to stock and hope it works out.

I OC'ed my CPU also for rendering, until it became unstable. Setting back to stock settings solved the stability issues then.
Looking at the settings you've used you should easily be able to render this.
If not, then only TG2 would crash, and not your PC of course...why did I think that for a short while lol

Kadri · March 08, 2010, 04:17:03 PM

Quote from: Primalace on March 08, 2010, 03:54:43 PM
You know what, I never even thought of that. I have overclocked, slightly. It must be restarting due to temperature, I never even thought of checking that! Is there a way to do application specific throttling of the CPU? Otherwise I'll just set it back to stock and hope it works out.

There are many Motherboard or CPU specific overclocking (controlling of pc performance !) software . Search your motherboard or CPU website or google for one.
But ı don't know if there is a software who can make this per application specific . But most of them are easy to use.
You can set the level of performance manual before you open TG2 (or rendering) and then set it where you want after back .

But i do not like these kind of software in general. I had most of the time more trouble then it was useful for me. But this is only me.
Your mileage(?) may vary

Cheers.

Kadri.

Primalace · March 08, 2010, 07:13:30 PM

Thank you guys for all the advice. I put my CPU back to stock speeds then carefully monitored the CPU temperature during a high quality render and it didn't exceed 60 degrees C nor did it crash

Here is the current progress though I'm probably going to be making adjustments to the snow areas of the mountain. Any advice, comments and criticisms are much appreciated.
-Mike