I just recently acquired this product. Great textures and atmosphere possibilities. However, the renders for materials seem to take a very long time. I recently put a Landmass object into a new scene and added only a material. NO atmoshpere and no other objects. Rendering takes longer than most.
I realized the mats are pretty complicated. Does anyone have a sweet spot on render settings that might make this move a bit faster but not sacrifice too much detail? Suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!!

TerraDome or Terradome2? And could you show your current settings please

Bill

This is the scene I rendered. It appears to be the MAT for LandMass - Mesa01. It's rather complicated. Also, when I add figures, the render drags even more. I have 8 Gig of memory but sometimes the render DROPS polys in the Landmass render and they come back as GRAY only.

The dropped POLYS appear when I add figures to the scene. It acts as though it's too much for it to handle. So, the question is where can I adjust the settings which might help etc.?

Thanks....I have a quad processor.....

I notice you have raytrace checked in your setting but no raytrace bounces; any reason why you chose this? I would include at least one bounce or uncheck raytrace. I've never had a tremendous render with Terradome even whether SubD on the mesh. What do you consider long render time?

First of all, the min shading rate of 0.1 is not even being used, unless you've changed the settings in the properties tab of every single thing in the scene. By default, props and figures have a min shading rate of 0.2.

But more than that, I'd try rendering with a higher min shading rate. Render a few images at different settings and see if you can actually tell the difference without zooming in to 300% or so. Me, I can't really see much difference between 0.5 and 0.2 even at resolutions of 5k x 5k pixels. But the difference in render time is significant.

Something looks very odd about that image, though -- as though the textures are stretching and distorting in ways I don't recall from using the product. IIRC, the landmass expansion comes with its own particular materials, and those may not show as much distortion. But I'll have to load up the product to see because it's been ages since I used TD1. (I use TD2 now.)

In any case, yes, terradome and terradome 2 take a bit longer to render . But I render with IDL, plus another million polys of geometry and their textures, and even that doesn't cause missing polys.

On the other hand, if you play around with terradome (or anything that is texture map heavy) by testing a whole bunch of different materials on it, you'll eventually completely max out your texture cache, and that will cause major memory usage. Saving your scene and then closing and re-opening Poser will usually take care of that issue.