Medieval city

mhaze · February 04, 2012, 08:55:49 AM

Love the bridge pic

Kadri · February 04, 2012, 11:31:00 AM

You will have a nice base of objects for your other renders too because of this project Ulco

Dune · February 07, 2012, 10:59:10 AM

Getting into the final stages. I still need to get the information for the castle, but the rest of the town is quite ok now. I can't get the whole thing here in good quality, so you'll have to do with a low quality jpg and a good quality crop. Final render will be 4-6 times this size, which I think is good enough for a billboard (which normally print at around 30dpi I found out, sometimes even less).
If there's anything you guys think can be better, please tell me.

By the way, this one rendered in an hour at detail 0.6 AA8, and remained just under 5GB memory use.

Dune · February 07, 2012, 10:59:30 AM

+crop

Tangled-Universe · February 07, 2012, 11:46:16 AM

Splendid Ulco

Such a cool project, really!

5 GB already and final resolution is >20k horizontal?
If so you'd require a clever strategy for final render, perhaps splitting it into several pieces and leaving out objects and such for example.
Do you already have an idea on how you're going to do it?

Cheers,
Martin

FrankB · February 07, 2012, 12:00:07 PM

Veeeery nice, Ulco

otakar · February 07, 2012, 12:57:02 PM

About the only thing that comes to my mind is some small scale displacement in the land. I know this is the flatlands, so hills are probably out of the question, but what about some small (not more than a couple of meters) tall piles of dirt, possibly overgrown. I'd expect those particularly on the periphery of the town (maybe old construction material hauled out or from agricultural activity). For some reason these wholly flat areas seem a bit unnatural, even from this perspective.

But if you say it won't be noticeable I'll buy that. It's an awesome job already. I hope you'll go out there and take some pictures once it's installed so we can get an idea of its actual size.

TheBadger · February 07, 2012, 09:15:14 PM

Cant wait to see the the final of everything.

Dune · February 08, 2012, 04:00:02 AM

Quote5 GB already and final resolution is >20k horizontal?

I'm not sure how big I need this thing to be a decent image on 7x2m. I found that billboards are usually printed at 30dpi or even less. You won't stand very close after all, and even 72dpi of a pc-screen looks very crisp. So even if I run it at 50 dpi, it's 2 pixels per mm, which for 7000mm would be 14000 wide. Do any of you guys know how much memory will be used if you increase size 6x from 4200x1200 to 12600x3600? Will that be 6x as high as well? I might go for 10000 wide after all, which IMO would be quite sufficient.

Tangled-Universe · February 08, 2012, 05:50:44 AM

It's not 6 times higher, but 9 times

Honestly I don't dare to say, I'm sorry.
I expect it to use at least 3x as much memory, but that's a wild guess really.
It depends on so many things like render detail and GI settings.

There are 2 things you could try, if you have the time:
1) I don't know if it will represent it very well, but you may consider rendering some crops of the current resolution vs the final resolution and see how the memory consumption changes.

2) Compare memory consumption when rendering full image @ 8400x2400 vs 4200x1200 vs 2100x600 vs 1050x300 and plot the RAM usage in something like Excel. You could set up an animation to do this all in 1 night. On your new machine it will take just a couple of hours, so you may even consider to add a couple of resolution just in between.

I'll attach an Excel later...

FrankB · February 08, 2012, 07:08:04 AM

to save RAM, potentially you would consider not using GI at all, but a fill light setup.

Tangled-Universe · February 08, 2012, 07:26:10 AM

Quote from: FrankB on February 08, 2012, 07:08:04 AM
to save RAM, potentially you would consider not using GI at all, but a fill light setup.

Yeah true, but GI @ 1/2/8 probably won't cost that much more RAM I think.

Dune · February 08, 2012, 10:46:27 AM

Yeah, 9x of course

I'll try something like you mentioned. What if I render in 2 crops? Easy enough to combine them in PS. There's not much in the way of clouds, just one to get a subtle shadow. I might even try to use the shadow function and make it a 2D cloud, if that makes any difference, although I never got that to work properly. I think it needs localized clouds.

I think render detail of 0.6 and AA8 (perhaps even at 1/16 and threshold 0.1) would be good enough, would AA have any influence on memory use?

Dune · February 11, 2012, 04:06:11 AM

QuoteI'll attach an Excel later...

Will you find time to do so?

I'll make the castle first (hope to get info after this weekend), finalize the town, then do some test renders as you said and plot it out.

Tangled-Universe · February 11, 2012, 04:09:22 AM

Quote from: Dune on February 11, 2012, 04:06:11 AM
QuoteI'll attach an Excel later...
Will you find time to do so?

I'll make the castle first (hope to get info after this weekend), finalize the town, then do some test renders as you said and plot it out.

Yes sorry I forgot, it's on my PC at work...I'll see if I can redo it here at home...shouldn't be too complicated

edit: file attached