• Tom Morris

  about 1 month ago

  About a month ago, I started experimenting with Planet Creator. I soon became frustrated, mostly due to poor rendering performance. It was taking many minutes to render a single frame. And I was hoping to use Planet Creator planets for animations.

  My biggest problem is that I have an older CPU and graphics card. It works acceptably while using other planet generators I find on Blender Market (and I use many). And it works great for video games. But not well enough for the challenging Blender rendering jobs required by Planet Creator.

  Here are the specs for my system
  Windows 11 Pro 64-bit
  32 GB RAM
  AMD Ryzen 3700X 8-core, 3.59 GHz
  Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 w/ 6GB video RAM

  But given the beauty and artistic potential of this feature, I kept exploring ways to make it work faster.

  My recommendations for improving rendering performance with Planet Creator include the following:

  Switch to the Cycles renderer first. Establish Cycles->Supported->GPU compute BEFORE dragging and dropping a Planet Creator planet onto scene.
  Under “Render Properties,” set “Viewport” Max Samples to 32 or less; set “Render” Max Samples to 32 or less; and set “Volumes” Max Steps to 32 or less.
  Don’t forget to set your Camera Clip End at 100,000

  Below is a rendering performance demonstration for my system.
  I positioned my camera at
  X: 1000
  Y:-1000
  Z: 704

  The planet sphere fills about 2/3 of the render screen.

  These are the single frame rendering times I got with my system (Max samples reduced to 32, 32, and 32). Rendering to 1920x1080.

  I dragged planets onto the view and I made no adjustments. These are “stock” planets.

  Basic Planet (1) = 1 minute 45 seconds
  Basic Planet (2) = 14.9 seconds
  Gas Planet_01 = 1 minute 46 seconds
  Gas Planet_02 = 2 minutes 3 seconds
  Gas Planet_03 = 27 seconds
  Planet = 10.7 seconds
  Rock Planet_02 = 15 seconds
  Rock Planet_03 = 16 seconds
  Rock Planet_04 – 1 minute 18 seconds
  Rock Planet_05 = 1 minute 37 seconds
  Rock Planet_06 = 2 minutes 8 seconds
  Rock Planet_08 = 32 seconds
  Rock Planet_09 = 1 minute 24 seconds
  Rocky Planet_01 = 55 seconds

  Right now, most of the Planet Creator planets are beyond my hardware’s capabilities for rendering animations. But by scaling back samples, I can get some very nice single frame shots – without too much waiting. And with a combination of reducing samples and a bit of patience, I can render beautiful (and short) animations.

  Apart from recommending new hardware, I would appreciate hearing suggestions for additional setup tweaks that could improve performance.

• 

  Damian Pietrykowski

  about 1 month ago

  Hi! Thank you for your purchase and review. As you have noticed, it is best to work directly in the cycles engine with a small number of samples in the preview. The most resource-intensive clouds here are volumetric clouds, where the number of samples needs to be significantly reduced to make everything work quickly. The animations I made were in 4K on the RTX 3090 and one frame with clouds and motion blur turned on took about 40 seconds to render. Just set Volumes/max steps to a low value of about 15. Clouds at this value will still be very detailed, but much faster. I suggest you watch this tutorial.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=251AdAAEiv0
  In future updates, we will focus mainly on speed in the clouds. Regards. Damian
• Ed Park

  4 months ago

  This is a fantastic plugin, it's straightforward to use and you can get a great variety of planets. Getting great use out of it!

• 

  Damian Pietrykowski

  3 months ago

  Thank you very much! :) I'm glad the plugin is useful! :)
• domie74

  4 months ago

  Great starting point for planet creation. All procedural with many settings easily accessible leading to endless variations.

• 

  Damian Pietrykowski

  4 months ago

  Thank you very much! :)

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