Medieval city

[airflamesred]

I can confirm that it is reversed normals. 5 tris to be precise. I exported the mesh as lwo and checked. I would have thought Poseray would have sorted it.

[Dune]

I'll check it in LW for reversed normals. I can imagine that, as just this morning I though it might have to do with the subtract method I used to get holes in the wall. I might need to reverse the polys before subtracting, or use adding and then deleting stuff I don't need. LW usually works fine for me, but I have to sort out these silly mistakes and get the fastest and best method to make windows or porches in a wall.

[Dune]

As far as I can tell, it seems that exporting from LW automatically makes an obj with tripled polys. But not all of them get exported 'right'. I tripled manually in LW, and the problem is gone! Thanks for your help, guys!

[Dune]

I learned another trick yesterday; first map the walls, then cut out the windows and doors and map those. Still tediously working on buildings, and I have to work on the terrain as well.

[Dune]

I haven't even started on the lighting, but just making houses and bridges and all sorts of medieval stuff.

[Henry Blewer]

The lighting 'out of the box' works well for many scenes. This will look better after the 'Ulco Touches' are applied. Nice test renders!

[FrankB]

very interesting to see this all come together piece by piece

[TheBadger]

this looks like a massive project!

[Dune]

It is! I hope to have it done by the deadline of end February. Still building, but I have a good workflow now, no more mistakes, got it all under control. A pity I have to keep the buildings as low in MB's as possible to be able to run the run render without problems with all these houses. I can always work on them later for more polys (like window sills, drain pipes and rounded rooftops).
Luca Rodolfi was so kind to build a quite complicated house, but it's no use to me, unfortunately, as it's heavy and not quite correct (for my purpose). Doing it myself right now.

[airflamesred]

I bumped into some of Luca's models yesterday, and some of them have an extraordinry poly count. I'm guessing there is some repetition in the textures (stone, roof tiles) that can be doubled up on various buildings?
Is it possible to add a low coverage surface layer, after the default shader to introduce some variation?

[Dune]

I don't know about his other models, but for variation you can add a color fractal (just default would do, only make the size very small, like 0.1/1/0.01), and feed this into the color input of the default shader where the image textures are called. Or attach a surface shader between the default and the part, and blend this by such a PF. You can add color/displacement (be careful) there, whatever you like. For world scale, add a transform shader after the PF and set to world scale.

[ra]

I really like following this work! Very inspiring! Thank you for that, Dune!

[Dune]

I have started to place some 15 buildings and test render, but already find it's going to 3 GB memory use. I want to keep that as low as possible, due to the fact that that there are some 75 buildings more to come (if not more), and maybe more trees and mist/clouds and such.
So I thought to make a series of default shaders, importing all standard textures needed (20 or so). Then shedding the internal default shaders from the objects' parts, and replacing them by linking to the 'default default shaders'. My only concern is now (haven't tested it yet) that as soon as I close and reopen, the links will be gone. Anyone for suggestions about how best to tackle this?

[Matt]

You won't lose the shader connections when you save and close. Node connections are attributes of the project. The only time objects have default connections created is when they are very first loaded by you into a project.

[Tangled-Universe]

Since you will render one huge still of this you ultimately may consider, if other things don't work out, to split the entire scene vertically in 2 or 3 tgd files and render those out separately. Each tgd will only contain the visible models with a slight overlap between sections.