Only twice have I tried to render a scene using procedural terrains and both times it took so long it just didnt seem worth it.  I constructed a new procedural terrain tonight to experiment with and started rendering it with Ultra, came back about an hour later to check the status and saw that 0% had rendered and it was estimated that it would take 1360 hours to render.  My comnputer is only a year old, I have almost 4 gigs of ram and a quad core....I'm just wondering if this is normal and if so if there's any way around it. 

I forgot to mention that I'm using Vue 6 infinite at the moment....I have Vue 7 infinite as well but am not really enjoying the new rendering process....

Do not use Ultra.

Ultra has "advanced effects settings" of 77%, if I remember correctly. One of the things that this settings controls is the quality of procedural terrains (it also controls other stuff, such as volumetric light, etc). You do not need 77% for a normal procedural terrain. This increases render time with no visible gain in most cases.

In fact, do not use any preset render setting. All the settings, from Final to Ultra, are, in my opinion, really poorly balanced. For example, Ultra, although it has such high "advanced effects quality", it has a too low anti-aliasing (80%, if I remember correctly). That's too low for many plants and clouds.

Always use user-settings render settings and adjust to the type of scene you have at hand. Each case is a case. In your particular case, try with advanced effects settings at, say, 40%, and compare. There could be other settings to adjust to get a good render time with procedural terrains, but this is the first that comes to mind.

Another thing: in Vue 7, the processing of procedural terrains is much faster... That's a good reason to upgrade. :-)

By the way, I use lots of procedural terrains. In my latest image, "Ascent", that's a procedural terrain driven by a 4096x4096 bitmap. I rendered it in Global Radiosity and the render time was 20 minutes (quad core, Vue7).

Thanks for the help, Artur.....do you have any suggestions or hints for how to set up User settings (in general).....

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