Medieval city

[TheBadger]

I am wondering how you knew what to charge for your fee for this project? It looks like your playing a number of rolls, designer, modeler, environment artist, more(?).

Graphic designers have The Graphic Artists Guild - graphicartistsguild.org/ to help them figure pricing out. What are you guided by Ulco?.. If you don't mind a little business talk

[Dune]

I don't mind at all, and to be honest I totally miscalculated this project. I worked on it for 3 months now (not all the time, but most of it). Especially making the houses took a tremendous time, as I am fairly new to modeling, and encountered several problems texturing at first. And there were complicated buildings I didn't know of when calculating my price. The terrain itself was a 'piece of cake', but placing the houses and rewiring their dependencies (they all link to a bunch of communal, internal shaders) took a lot of time as well; 240 houses of 35 types or so. Boring job.
I was also afraid they would find a guy who just painted something cheap and fast, and I was quite keen to do this. But despite the low earnings, it gives me a great sense of reward, having pulled this out of my hat.
I'm not a member of any organization such as you mention, so I have to think ahead and try to imagine the time I will spend. Hard, but a lesson for next time  

Soft shadows improves the image a lot, as does elimination of my fill light. Martin's recommendations followed, but I made the soft shadow 1 and samples 5, jitter 1. Still takes almost 3 hours for this part, which is about 1/8 of the total. Added a wagon I made yesterday (not the horses). Another crop is now rendering with jitter 0, see what happens. I also lowered the wave size for the next crop.

No post work, by the way.

[Tangled-Universe]

So a final rendertime of 24-30 hours. Not bad at all, hence the huge resolution. I know you don't like long (overnight) renders, but you really have to face it this time

[Dune]

I guess so. I only see there's a glitch in the hind wall of the castle area. Some polys darkened, where they shouldn't be 

[Henry Blewer]

I have been following this, but not commenting. I think this is really wonderful. Great work Ulco!

[TheBadger]

That last render is so crisp! Really very good quality Ulco. And thanks for the info, if you learn of a guild for this kind of work please let us know!

[Kadri]

For a rough-base estimate

http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/

[otakar]

Frakking wonderful! Don't try to count the minutes to render this man, this is the result of 3 months of work after all. You'll want it to appear as close to perfect as you can get it.

And you'll have a great visible reference project behind you for as long as you want to use it to drum up more work and justify your prices. That must be worth something.  

[Dune]

Thanks guys. You're absolutely right of course, otakar. It's just that these guys aren't very appreciative (in their words) of all the effort that went into it. It's a bit hard therefor to give them the pleasure to enjoy it in full quality. But your last sentence is very relevant, and I will surely pursue highest quality. It's a matter of pride as well. One of the reasons I post is to qualify myself as worthwhile hiring; it's my job after all.

I also want to take this opportunity to encourage professionals to post images they (partly) make with TG. They're probably lurking around anyway to pick up some bits and pieces, so why not post? It's good to encourage people get the most out of this fantastic software, it's one of my reasons anyway. Besides getting a lot of C&C.   

Back to business; the jitter of soft shadows at zero gives banding indeed.

[Tangled-Universe]

Ah indeed, well it was worth trying

I too wonder why other professionals here are either inactive or not posting works.
NDA's certainly are part of the reason I believe, but still in the end it's virtually always possible to show at least something.

I know a couple of people, Matt for instance, who don't like sharing their personal doodle's because they think it's not of good quality and/or interesting.
Which is non-sense of course
Like Ulco said, just show it!

[rcallicotte]

Wow.  This is amazing.  Having watched this over the time period since this thread began, you have done a fine job of placing intricate details - impressive.

[TheBadger]

I agree. Besides, generally its the script that has to be kept secret, a few images are not going to give much away. I would also keep the name of the client secret in most cases.

[FrankB]

Very nice Ulco. I am very keen to seeing the full render one day perhaps. This is a job extremely well executed!

[RRMessiah]

The landscape and trees are the best part. The renders look better without the town

The quality of the buildings and the shadows are what is pulling it away from being stellar. The buildings are all perfect boxes and not well integrated into the terrain. The shadows are all perfect and hardedged. This is of course unnatural. Is there a way for Terragen to blur the shadows?

[masonspappy]

I too wonder why other professionals here are either inactive or not posting works.

Interesting observation and, I think, quite correct.  Speaking only for myself, my images routinely incorporate Terragen 'scapes, xFrog plants, Blender objects, and even people from DAZ3D.  I believe Terragen and xFrog art the best programs at what they do, and Blender is a remarkable program that is - amazingly - free. For my work, I need all these elements. I haven't posted many (most) of them here because I just wasn't sure that would be seen as an appropriate use of this forum.    Which has been kind of a bummer, as I'm really looking for honest feedback about my images to make them better, and I certainly get that here. And it's been greatly appreciated.