Supersampling

I was off on my render time comparison kind of. The render time displayed doesn't seem to count all the set up time that seems to be going on be fore the rendering really starts. So I just timed from when I clicked Save until when the new render finished.

Here's a pretty good example of quality to render time. I'm curious how High would look in comparison to my supersampled draft version.

You are correct. I recommend trying it if you want to make Draft AO look probably as good as High, but with a decent render time. Just render with no AA at twice the res and rescale by half in photoshop or whatever.

I'd also like to ask the FF team if they can make it so while rendering, FF tells windows not to go into sleep. This has happened to me twice while rendering on Best. I have to open a separate program that will keep windows running in order to render like that. Maybe this is an option actually, but I'm still rendering from yesterday (because it paused for sleep) so I can't check. This render is taking hours regardless of windows going into sleep though. Is this expected when rendering on Best?

Thanks KG!

Well I don't think it's that supersampling is necessarily faster but the way AA interacts with the AO is screwy. This could be a bug, something that FF guys are aware of and already fixing, or maybe there's no work around and supersampling is a viable option now. I'm sure without AO, AA is justified.

The initial render pass takes hardly any time and looks mostly the same with all AO quality levels. It's only when the AA/smoothing pass comes that the render process either smudges the look (like in the first image) or takes a long time to render. Whatever process the AA takes is not friendly with their implementation of AO, that's for sure.

I'm still rendering on High AO from when I started last night. Total render time has been maybe 3 hours (because of my computer sleeping last night) and the AA pass has only gotten maybe 15% done. The AA pass hadn't even shown any results the last time I looked, 1.5 hours ago. So it seems like it's going to take many many more hours to complete. Surely something is wrong?

Here's one more comparison with the Best render included, it never finished, I canceled, but I print screened it. I'll take the 8:00 render time supersampled one over best Not enough gain in quality to justify it!

Aw screw it, I'll just attach the filter here. I've added some fun stuff to it to make it extra slow hehe.

I've been testing the AO Best setting on 2 computers. My work one which is what this new grass filter was made on, is a nice quad core with 8GB of ram. My home computer which is where I made my other grass filter, is a Core i7 which is quad core but I get 8 threads rather than 4, plus it has 12GB of ram. They're both pretty beefy and they both had the same rendering issues, my home one was slightly better.

I'm attaching so maybe the FF guys can see (if for some crazy reason this is only happening to me) what I'm talking about as well.

FF2 - Grass2.ffxml

I've noticed the delay in rendering with AO as well.
Attached is a simple test filter.

Render times of all presets at default size:
0.22 sec (none)
2.10 sec (draft)
14.51 sec (low)
31.73 sec (medium)
1min 18 sec (high)
4 min 01 sec (best)

The presets with AO set to 'high' and 'best' hang a bit with CPU usage showing around 13%.
The preset with high AO hangs for around 4 seconds.
Best AO takes 12 sec to start rendering.

Ben, your grass filter (which is really great, btw) hangs for around 1min 10sec.

System is an i7 920 @ 3.8GHz with 6GB RAM.

Simple AO Render Test.ffxml

Wow. That grass is absolutely incredible. Extremely slow, but extremely realistic. And the down-sampling really improves the final result without a significant increase in time.

Interesting flowers BTW.

ben,

on your posted filter, 11 minutes 32 seconds with AA off and AO on high. and, 1 hour, 7 minutes, 2 seconds with AA on (5 samples) and AO on high.

oh, and that's a totally amazing filter. instant EP in my book!