Elven Village Inn

[Mohawk20]

This is not what you are after...But have you tried a fake night render(make a day scene and dim  it)? .With exr output it will easier to do i think and who knows maybe faster  too

Kadri.

This isn't a night scene, it's an ecclipse. So the sun is right there in the image, only there's a planet in front of it...

[Mandrake]

TerrAde just did this one, I don't know if this is where your going but I found it interesting.
http://www.terragen.org/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-6071

[Kadri]

This is not what you are after...But have you tried a fake night render(make a day scene and dim  it)? .With exr output it will easier to do i think and who knows maybe faster  too

Kadri.

This isn't a night scene, it's an ecclipse. So the sun is right there in the image, only there's a planet in front of it...

Yes , but you can still fake it. You know this software way way better then me.
Unfortunately what we see in real life is not always the same in software.You know this

Edit : For example : Make the planet  like a sun too. And make the brightness relative  to the real sun....But i have not tried this of course.

Kadri.

[Mohawk20]

However the end result can be achieved, the presence of noize is strange.
I guess it's coming from the moons atmo, that's why I increased the amples of atmo2 more than atmo1.

[Oshyan]

Strange. What happens if you disable the other light sources? Is Soft Shadows enabled? Is there a cloud layer present?

- Oshyan

[Mohawk20]

Strange. What happens if you disable the other light sources? Is Soft Shadows enabled? Is there a cloud layer present?

- Oshyan

1. Don't know, haven't tried that. But the noize around the lights isn't that big.
2. Yes, for all light, all with Shadow Samples at 9 (which might be the problem with such distance between planets...)
3. Nope.

Thanks for thinking along, I'll try a render without soft shadows, and one with higher samples.

[dandelO]

Weird, I've only seen this happening with lightsource objects, never sunlight. I'd say it is the glow from the lightsources being in front of the sunlight that's making all that noise. But, the lights don't appear to be that bright to illuminate so far away from their source. Weird.
It's a great scene, though.

[Mohawk20]

Weird, I've only seen this happening with lightsource objects, never sunlight. I'd say it is the glow from the lightsources being in front of the sunlight that's making all that noise. But, the lights don't appear to be that bright to illuminate so far away from their source. Weird.
It's a great scene, though.

Thanks!

Well, disabeling the soft shadows of the sun did the trick, though the sky becomes a LOT darker. So now I'm trying more samples. But the little bit of render that is done still shows lots of noize with samples at 64, so I need to go a lot higher.

[Mohawk20]

Below two small test crops.
The dark one has no soft shadows, but no light in the atmo either.
The othe is really small, bu has still noize even at 1024 soft shadow samples!
Both crops took a long time, around 20 hours, even these small crops.

[Mohawk20]

Success!!!!
I finally found the solution!
Well, Oshyan did, but I found the correct settings.

Since 1024 Soft Shadow samples still left noize in the render I tried 10240, but that also had noize.
So I skipped to 51200 samples and finally got a smooth render (see below). Took over 11 hours to render only this crop.

Since 9 samples is default, 51200 was needed, I think some changes are in order, either in default setting or programming?
I'm just glad I got it to work... now let's see how it looks and how long it takes when I lower the atmo quality samples.

[Mandrake]

Fantastic, but with that lag, are you going to incorporate that in you movie?

[Kadri]

... Took over 11 hours to render only this crop...

You are insane... LOL...
I think you are realy happy now 

Kadri.

[Mohawk20]

Fantastic, but with that lag, are you going to incorporate that in you movie?

Well, both atmo's (of the the planet and the moon) had 64 quality samples. Those are down to 16 again (should be enough), and if I keep the render size small it could render fairly quick (though a crystal [or watershaded] statue is in every frame as well it's still pretty slow).

So we shall see. I have 10 seasons of Agatha Christies Poirot to watch if I really go make this anim, so I'll be fine 

[Oshyan]

The reason this is so challenging - and mind you this is not a problem that other renderers have necessarily solved either - is the tremendous scales involved here. You're working with millions of miles of distance, most likely. Or at least 1000s. Numerically it's very large, in any case. And the renderer has to cast "rays" across that space and hopefully hit something relevant. The larger the distance, the smaller the chance of each ray hitting something and creating a correct pixel, but even if it doesn't "hit", it still takes time to calculate. So you get lots of noise due to few rays that are cast making contact and creating a pixel of the image. You need extremely high samples to saturate the image space and essentially guarantee through brute force that you get enough quality "hits".

Try working with a million mile across scene in 3DS Max or really any other app, you'll have probably even more problems. TG2 is one of the few programs that actually handles such scales well.

Mind you it's only the soft shadows that cause this problem. Granted you need the soft shadows for a certain effect in your render, but as you've seen others have had good eclipse images without this issue, and I believe that's because they don't use soft shadows. The results can still be good, and without the render time.

- Oshyan

[Henry Blewer]

Oshyan has a good point. Maybe using smaller scales to achieve the same effect would be faster and easier. Render the sky effects/images separately. Then render the landscape and objects. An image can be made to use as a shadow mask (not sure how). Then use compositing software to combine the two.