Rendering

I had space on the train up from London this week - and needed the relaxation to create this terragen render:

Not much apart from the lighting but it went well with my mood!

Flaky rocks

Here's my latest terragen render

rather too flaky the rocks? maybe I should calm down that shader a bit?

Wonders why the picture doesn't show - if you click on the image it will download!

Water surface and terragen

A recent terragen render - this took a couple of days to complete. I'm still on terragen 3 and intending an upgrade when I can get around to adding some extra memory to the desktop! Maybe it needs a few more textures that rock is a little too uniform?
Terragen is a Windows application but it runs happily under Wine.

Lake scene

I thought I'd already posted some of this terragen work, but apparently not, so here's the latest state.


I'm not sure about some of those greens...

More alps

Here's the latest render from the current project.

A bit bare but with the colours layers I've set up I don't think there's likely to be a lot growing? I think the snow could do with being a bit chunkier? Looks like talcum power?

Mountain scene

Just to redress this warm weather here's a snowy terragen scene, snow and some nice (IMHO) erosion.



Mountain looks a bit too much like a frog though?

And another shot from elsewhere in the landscape:

Tarn again

I've done a bit more on that terragen mountain scene and have installed the new erosion shader. I think I need to limit the erosion a bit!

And from a slightly different viewpoint having sorted out some more things:

From the same file having moved the camera and added a few more things, maybe I need to calm down those stones in the foreground a bit?

(I had to recover this post there appears to be some sort of blogger bug where changing tabs while editing ends up with a different post in the edit window and if you save it it overwrites the original!)

Getting boulder

After working my way through Neuspadrin's
fake stones shader tutorial here's my boulder.
Just lying on the ground with the default background - with some added shaders. Base of the boulder looks a bit as if it has been wrapped in clingfilm maybe that's the redirect shader altitude?

Mountain scene

I've made the plunge and upgraded to Terragen 3 here's a render where I rather like the outcrops. I was trying to get some stones in the foreground but seem to be failing, there are though some nice tutorials with the new release I will have to dive into! I commented a few weeks ago at the slowness when running this windows app under linux with wine, this slowdown isn't quite so bad when running on a 64 bit Ubuntu installation, I'm not sure whether this is the 64 bit terragen, wine or the base operating system that's responsible for the better performance!
As a later comment it would appear that most of the slowdown was due to a PassThruSvr.exe process - investigation revealed this .exe had nothing to do with the ordinary running of wine but was something I must have installed when I was trying to configure my old HTC phone. I renamed the file and renders ran rather more quickly!

Alps - virtual ones

Here's the latest terragen render:

About 7 hours of rendering. I quite like this and am currently deciding whether to indulge in the planetside sale and upgrade to Terragen 3 more features, a version that gets bug fixes, but I think I'm still wandering around in the shallows of the application. But enjoying myself!

Terragen and wine - a speed comparison

I commented last week about the difference in speed between running Terragen natively in windows and using wine to run the application under linux. Here's 2 screenshots, the first shows the render output from my Vista installation,
as you'll see from the title bar the render finished in 45m55s. Here's the incomplete render in Kubuntu/wine

so that's 17 hours 57m44s (!). When I've tried before there wasn't quite this disparity between the 2 environments. Most of the time on Ubuntu was overnight - and I was asleep so it wasn't due to system busyness. I haven't used XFrog plants previously maybe this is a cause but wine claims to be of a similar performance to the native app - clearly that's not true here.

Terragen scene

I'm trying again with Terragen 2 - I know that version 3 is out so getting my head around the version 2 features is taking a little time...I used the tutorial from here and then fiddled with it a little to get this:

I'm not sure I'm convinced by the foreground but otherwise I'm showing signs of improvement! I ran this on my Vista installation, running on my kubuntu desktop (using Wine to run the windows .exe) is rather slower I don't know whether that is due to the 'emulation' being slower in this case or whether I'm just using the desktop for more things at the same time!

Terragen again

I've not put a terragen render up in ages, and have nearly forgotten how to use it, I need a few tutorials - these might be a suitable start. This image is fairly basic but I hope to improve it...

If you click on the 'terragen' label at the foot of the post you'll see that this is windows software running very nicely under linux.

Winter

Terragen 2.1 is out. Extra features and speedups. Here's an appropriate seasonal image I rendered this morning with the new version (and using Linux and Wine) - as opposed to what one might want to do with Mistletoe and the other substance!

This image took about an hour, I did a similar one with fewer layers yesterday and than took 3 hours!? Maybe it was the restart or the changes I'd done up to then?

Wine still works!

Following my mandriva upgrading - I keep on being impressed by the speed - maybe I should have been appalled by the slowness of 2009.1 (and I think 2009). I was just checking, last night that wine - unfortunately not the drink, it's a Linux application which enables those apps which, alas, aren't ported to linux to run in this environment - in some cases they run as fast as they do in native windows. So here is a terragen render, runs pretty much as in windows and this image took around 10 minutes to produce which, I'd say, was impressive.

Terragen 2

Back in Spring last year I posted a render produced with a beta of terragen 2 and mentioned that it had taken around 30 hours to produce. Planetside are now nearly at the release point - folks like me who have pre-paid can download - release is waiting for the website and maybe a few other things. I'm running it using Linux and wine and something has definitely speeded up - maybe the betas had some debugging code, maybe it is better at spotting dual cores (though that fix appeared to go in an earlier beta), I've just repeated that render - well same base file, slightly different camera position and it now takes just over 7 hours! I didn't really notice much of a slow down either.

Four times the speed is certainly appreciated!

Lent i

We'll see how this develops, an initial Terragen render

terragen render

Not uploaded one of these for quite a time - but now have wine, nvidia and mandriva working well again and can run terragen under wine. This needs a bit more work - on the greenery I think as well as a more interesting sky - though this one took around 30 hours to render - and slightly slowed the machine down too!
This is with the latest terragen 2 beta.

Ash Wednesday - i

in the desert with Terragen

Wine plays more nicely with terragen

I've found this patch to wine and now i'm no longer having to shade and unshade terragen2 to see what I'm doing when running under linux - latest render...
makes things a lot easier!