Animation based on Oshyan's Benchmark- Shows noticable artifacts

[PabloMack]

I just posted my first notable animation in Terragen 2 (what great fun I had).  It is a 1000-frame sequence based on the benchmark that Oshyan posted.  Except for removing the black shiny ball, I left the scene pretty much intact.  The render is 480 X 270 wide screen format.  There are two things to note that would not be seen in a still: 

1.  Apparently some of the terrain changes form through time.  Watch the shadow of a peak to the left cast onto some rocks to the right as you pass by early in the sequence. 

2.  The clouds shimmer.  My wife commented that this would have to be fixed before the animation would be usable.  Watch the clouds ahead of you before you make the big banking turn to the right about mid-way in the sequence.  Also watch the shimmering shadows of clouds on the big mountain that you fly over near the end of the sequence.  Also watch the tops of the clouds once you ascend above the cloud later.  There seemed to be a noticable loss of quality from my original render but you should be able to see what I'm talking about.  It it very noticable on my pre upload render. 

You can watch this video at the link below.  The rest of the sequence is just window dressing. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azmru5qoKPA

-PabloMack

[Oshyan]

Nice to see the scene animated and explore some other parts of it. It doesn't look half bad.

The flickering is almost certainly due to GI. You can adjust settings to help (usually increasing GI Sample Quality and GI Blur, and enabling Supersample Prepass, all of which will increase render time), or you can simply use a fill light setup instead of GI. There is an example of such a setup posted as a sticky in the File Sharing area of the forum.

The shadow issue you mentioned would probably be fixed by using the "Ray Detail Region" settings in the Advanced tab of the Renderer node. Change it to Detail in Camera and use a value of 0.5 or 1.0. These settings are specifically designed to handle those kinds of issues. Basically what it does is extend the area of detected terrain detail further outside of the view of the camera, so that for example if a mountain is off camera and casting a shadow onto terrain that is on camera, it will have enough detail to render correctly and not "pop" as the camera moves.

- Oshyan