Terragen job submission overview

The feature set in Terragen is entirely available within Pixel Plow. We support tiled stills, additional outputs, and GI cache handling. We make a few small changes in submitted scene files to make sure your scene can take full advantage of our hardware infrastructure. This means you don’t have to do any special rendering tweaks for your scene to be optimized for our farm.

Still images with either resolution greater than 1,900 pixels will be automatically tiled. We consider any job a “still” if the start frame and end frame are identical or there is only one frame specified in the frame list field of the job submission window, so you may use any frame number from 1 on up as the source of your still. In general, resolutions with even numbers tile the best. We can work with one output dimension being odd, but not both. The tiling mechanism simply won’t allow for that. Use of 2D Motion Blur, Ambient Occlusion lighting, or any Post Effect in your scene file will also prevent tile rendering, as none of those features can function correctly when tiled. As of this writing, Terragen 4 “Easy Clouds” have their own GI mechanisms that are not cacheable. Please use one of the above settings to prevent tile rendering a still image if your scene file uses Easy Clouds.

You don’t need to do anything special to enable additional output for your scenes. If you have additional output enabled in your scene, we will detect that and handle it appropriately. Any additional output created from your scene will be delivered with the primary output of each frame. At present, our tile stitching software can only handle stitching the primary output together. If you submit a still image render with additional output enabled, we will only render it on one of our nodes, regardless of the chosen power level.

The easiest job submission method for Terragen is to use Terragen’s “Export Gathered Project” from the File menu. This will put your scene file and all its external assets into a folder. It will also change your scene file so that all links to the assets will be made relative, so that other systems that open your scene file from a different root path will be able to locate those assets. You may submit a job pointing to the folder created during the Export Gathered Project process directly without modification. We recommend the folder you choose as a destination for your project be a new and empty folder. This minimizes the amount of data to upload to only that which is relevant to your scene.