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#1
Terragen Animation / Cyan Eyed Biomes | Part 1 - a ...
Last post by Njen - Today at 06:22:49 PM
It's been a while since I have posted work here, but I think this is worth the wait! Explore the rich world of Cyan Eyed (award winning animated short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2h1Mtcn9VQ) with the first in a series of breath taking flythroughs of various landscapes that feature the beauty of a world that seemingly goes on forever. Clouds drift and evolve, ley lines brim with energy, water laps at the shores, birds meander about, even the sun changes angle just a little bit. All this happens while Captain Corliss 'The Red Snake' Vail's feared skyship, The Black Cloud sails through the skies, looking for its next prey.

If you can, please watch to the end and even click through the end card as it really helps me with the Youtube algorithm.

This fully 3D environment was created and rendered in Terragen (except for the skyship comped in from 3DS Max), with all three minutes of this single continuous shot taking over 4 months to render on just two computers (I never like my computers doing noting at night).


#2
Terragen Discussion / Re: Pixel gaps in rendering
Last post by sboerner - Today at 01:09:49 PM
Oh, and by the way. Changing the filter to Cubic B-Spline seems to have fixed the artifact issue. I did 3-4 renderings with no changes to any other settings, and they all look good.

One artifact did appear after I specified a custom value for the subdivision cache. But the documentation clearly warns that reserving too much memory for the cache can cause rendering issues. I'll back off on that to see if it fixes it. There is a lot of shallow water in the scene, so increasing the cache can make a big difference in rendering times.
#3
Terragen Discussion / Re: Pixel gaps in rendering
Last post by sboerner - Today at 11:42:54 AM
For some reason one of the attachments didn't make it. Here it is.
#4
Terragen Discussion / Re: Pixel gaps in rendering
Last post by sboerner - Today at 11:41:11 AM

QuoteI have access to most of the Mega Scan Library, if you post  (or private pm) the file I can almost certainly re-create it without you having to share the commercial file.

Alternatively, try to convert the exr to a 16bit tiff and see if the issue remains. I doubt the image would look any different after the conversion.

The material causing the error is "pine_2x2m_Bark_Pine_vmbibe2g." The displacement file is "vmbibe2g_4K_Displacement.exr."

I checked other Megascans surface materials, though, and found that many of them use "[R]" single-channel EXR files for displacement. They are easy to spot in Adobe Bridge -- the thumbnail previews show up bright red.

Opening and simply resaving the files (as OpenEXR) in Photoshop converts them to RGB files and fixes the problem.

The attached tgd will show the error. I've removed the displacement file from the Project_Assets folder -- you'll need to drop it in there. Here's what I see when I open the tgd:

trImage attempting to read file Project_Assets/vmbibe2g_4K_Displacement.exr
FreeImage error: Warning: loading color model R as Y color model


The error appears benign in that it doesn't cause any rendering problems . . . but as I suspected no displacement or bump is produced. The attached renderings show the results of using the original EXR file vs. one fixed by a round trip through Photoshop.

Interesting.

#5
Image Sharing / Re: Canyon series 1
Last post by Dune - March 27, 2024, 11:37:23 AM
Didn't read it well. I see now.
#6
Image Sharing / Re: Canyon series 1
Last post by Tangled-Universe - March 27, 2024, 11:20:09 AM
No as I said I deleted all the nodes except the 2 simple shapes which create the walls +1 compute and lambert and only those 4 nodes take 45 minutes to render vs 37 sec non-PT.
#7
Terragen Discussion / Re: Pixel gaps in rendering
Last post by cyphyr - March 27, 2024, 10:12:28 AM
I have access to most of the Mega Scan Library, if you post  (or private pm) the file I can almost certainly re-create it without you having to share the commercial file.

Alternatively, try to convert the exr to a 16bit tiff and see if the issue remains. I doubt the image would look any different after the conversion.
#8
Image Sharing / Re: Canyon series 1
Last post by Dune - March 27, 2024, 02:16:51 AM
I can imagine :(  Strange that it takes so long, it doesn't look overly complicated, and displaced. Too many shaders before a compute perhaps? Perhaps it would be possible to make the scene with 2 cubes as walls. You'd only miss the subtle transition with the floor then, but it might be faster (no compute needed, I'd say).
#9
Image Sharing / Re: Canyon series 1
Last post by Tangled-Universe - March 26, 2024, 08:01:26 PM
I agree with you about the vertical one being the most interesting, for the same reasons.
The scene does not contain any kind of reflective shader. It's really only one single lambert shader with bright orange colour which does all the work in conjunction with GI.

I'm afraid I have to postpone my plan to do a PT render of it.
I just trimmed down the entire setup to basically only 2 simple shape shaders which create the canyon and somehow that takes 45 minutes vs 37 seconds for non-PT.
This means that my 5'ish hour render for that vertical one will take 20 days. No thanks haha...
There must be a reason for why TG doesn't like this particular and I guess rare situations, since normally it's only a couple of times slower, not 2 orders of magnitude.
#10
Image Sharing / Re: Canyon series 1
Last post by Dune - March 26, 2024, 12:24:45 PM
If you ask; the latter, vertical one appeals most to me, because of the contrasts. PT has 'trouble' with tiny displacements+reflection, that may be the 'problem'. But even a very small PT render will show the differences, I'd say.