On 01/10/15 10:08, clipka wrote:
[...]
> Uh... wait - sky? ocean?
> 
> We are talking about the moon, as in, /our/ moon, right?

Oh, absolutely.

I enclose three more pictures; this is the same scene, taken from about
25km up, in twilight, dawn and daylight, respectively. They took a
drastically different amount of time to render; the daylight one was 235
seconds, while the dusk one was 1320.

These use these settings:

	method 3
	jitter 0.1
	ratio 1
	samples 3, 30

The jitter has helped with the banding, at the expense of some noise.
(The dark shadow in the dawn picture should be there; it's the planet's
shadow cast through the atmosphere. But it shouldn't be that grainy.)

Interestingly, in the dawn picture, it's the *sea* that's the expensive
bit --- presumably because of tangential rays from the sun (off to the
right). In the dusk picture, it's the atmosphere. In the daylight
picture, they're both cheap.

Unfortunately, UberPOV is largely out of the question, because I'm using
a custom patched POV anyway. (The DLL code.) So I'm going to have to
start playing with aa_level and aa_threshold, right? Although I hadn't
thought of fiddling with focal blur. I'll have to try that.

I know I can get good results by cranking up the power --- but I want to
do it *efficiently*, because my renders are slow enough as it is.
Imagine what it's going to be like after I drop a million trees onto the
landscape!

(Both the terrain and the ocean are isosurfaces, their shape controlled
by data provided by a DLL. Did you know the moon's gravitation field is
lumpy? The lunar ocean varies in height by about a kilometre.)

-- 
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