Quote from: FrankB on January 15, 2012, 07:31:52 PM
Most of these questions are really for Martin to answer, as I don't know what settings he rendered this at or how he came to decide these were the settings to choose.
Some of those trees seem like relatively undistinguished painterly blotches, that is right. I think it's a bit of an unlucky combination of lighting conditions, distance-based level of detail management from TG2, the render detail settings used, and the tree model itself.
The more I look at the render, the more I realize how many opportunties for detail we haven't used, yet. For example, there is Walli's hut that we had planned to include at the shore, and we'll probably crop render that back in later. However there are so many more things that come to my mind that could be embedded in this image, or made differently, that I have the feeling this may probably not be the last render we'll see - IF Martin and I both feel like getting at it again. You know, after you've been working on an image for so long, it's hard to resist the urge to go on to something else, but it's possible I could bring myself to it.
Anyway, thanks for liking the image, everyone! It was a pleasure creating it, that's for certain.
Frank
I'm curious what more you have in mind
I agree that some things are subject for improvement.
As might be expected the flaws of the scene become apparent at this extreme resolution.
The way the trees came out are indeed a combination of lighting, texture-settings, render settings and perhaps the way TG2 handles detail.
The latter is not sure at all, as with this much screenspace to render this shouldn't matter I'd think, although you would expect a bit better results.
@Badger
The potential most time-consuming elements in this render are obviously the water and vegetation.
Generally terrain rendering is much faster than vegetation, unless you have an unsurpassed complex displacement going on, which is definitely not the case here.
Since we render this at very high resolution you could image that is basically the same render, only extremely magnified.
As with microscopy, a good lens resolves a lot of detail at great magnification. In CG this is no concern, so the only thing you need to be concerned about is to tell the renderer to generate enough detail.
So, if you do a crop render @ final resolution and watch it in photoshop then you can decide to render out the final at a certain detail level.
In this case I could have rendered it @ detail 0.6-0.65 instead of 0.75, probably shaving of 20% of rendertime, maybe more/less, when I'd only render rasterized elements like terrain/water.
However, I do know that the dense vegetation will be the most time-consuming, so a bit longer rendering of terrain in favor of good detail won't skew rendertimes too much.
That's why I decided to render it with AA6@max sampling. This provides similar results as AA8@1/4th, but is a lot faster.
Later more...duty calls...
