190h05m and still rendering

Started by TheBadger, February 28, 2012, 09:53:25 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

TheBadger

jo,

You may keep and use the scene as you see fit. But please let me know first if you intend to publish any images from it, for any reason. I still have plans to develop this project, I even have a script (Rough Draft)
I'm just glad to have finally contributed something here! Yay me! ;D

QuoteI wonder if it would be worth using a distance shader to limit the image map to the visible part of the scene. Just far enough so you still get maze along the horizons.

This is strange, because I thought that anything not in view of the camera had no effect on anything. Your solution sounds like it will work.

QuoteI edited the file so it reduced the number of images loaded from 1300 odd to 5. I also took out the painted shaders as it seemed from what you said that it was ok to do. The original file took 9.52 GB when loaded, the edited one took "only" 6.43 GB. I will send you a copy of the edited file.

That really is a massive reduction, I take it that the file is much easier to deal with now?
How can you transfer the file back to me? The same way I sent it?

Thanks a lot jo, you and Oshyan have really gone out of your way for me on this. Thats very generous.
It has been eaten.

jo

Hi Badger,

Quote from: TheBadger on March 26, 2012, 08:24:06 PM
You may keep and use the scene as you see fit. But please let me know first if you intend to publish any images from it, for any reason.

We'd use it solely for testing internally, we wouldn't publish any images from it.

Quote
QuoteI wonder if it would be worth using a distance shader to limit the image map to the visible part of the scene. Just far enough so you still get maze along the horizons.

This is strange, because I thought that anything not in view of the camera had no effect on anything. Your solution sounds like it will work.

I really don't know if it will make any difference. I was thinking that stuff in the far distance which isn't very visible might be having an effect on atmosphere calculations or something.

Quote
That really is a massive reduction, I take it that the file is much easier to deal with now?

It still takes a fair old while to load, but that is down to the time needed to load the objects.

Quote
How can you transfer the file back to me? The same way I sent it?

I'll just PM you a link to the file when it's ready to go. I'll only send the project file, you've got everything else already :-). It's only about 725 kb.

Regards,

Jo

TheBadger

It has been eaten.

King Mango

I was curious about this and read the whole thread. I have a question about the painted shader. Is that the module that stores the height info for the walls?

I have made a maze before in Maya and what I did was paint the maze white on a black background (or black on a white background, it's been YEARS lol) using Photoshop and then I coverted the image to paths where the edges of black and white created curves. I saved this out as an adobe illustrator paths file, imported that into Maya where I had a set of curves on a flat plane. I duplicated the curves and then lofted them to fill in the walls, converted that to polygons. I suspect if it's the walls giving you trouble you could try something similar though I notice your walls have a slight angle to them and I am not sure what kind of trouble that would give you with your existing ivys.

And I'm not even sure if that's your hangup anyway! :D

Looking forward to seeing this resolved. :cheers:

TheBadger

Quote from: King Mango on March 30, 2012, 10:48:57 PM
I was curious about this and read the whole thread. I have a question about the painted shader. Is that the module that stores the height info for the walls?
Looking forward to seeing this resolved. :cheers:

Hi,

No. The height for the walls was set in the image map projection node. The maze is grown out of an image map I placed on the surface of the planet. Everything in the maze is image mapped, except the terrain and plants. So the walls and all other details are image maps.
The resolution of this project was that it would probably have been better to use a .obj for the maze, with the ivy already on the walls. The way I did it as you read, caused a lot of render problems in terms of time. Although, Jo, did manage to get the file size down, and Im very interested to learn what impact his work will have on render time.
It has been eaten.

King Mango

Ah ok. Thanks for the clarification. Don't forget this technique in the future. It's quite helpful even for cities if you want to creat a city block just start with a back canvas and paint your building footprints in white then create the curves and get them into your modeling program of choice and you have an instant city rough-out.

dandelO

Here's a functional maze-type noise I made a while ago in this thread; http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=10826.msg112850#msg112850

It is pretty basic and unscientific, you can't really specify a complete path through it from a 'point A' to 'point B' but, it will cover the entire ground if you need it to, it can also be masked and you can easily rescale it with a transform shader. Saves messing around with fidgety image maps and you could probably export a terrain out of it, if you softened the edges of the borders some, I'd try a colour adjust shader or a smooth step range to try and smooth the edges out a bit to create a terrain. As it is, it's very sharp and rough so wouldn't displace very nicely without some extra work.

TheBadger

Quote from: dandelO on April 02, 2012, 10:03:24 AM
Here's a functional maze-type noise I made a while ago in this thread; http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=10826.msg112850#msg112850

It is pretty basic and unscientific, you can't really specify a complete path through it from a 'point A' to 'point B' but, it will cover the entire ground if you need it to, it can also be masked and you can easily rescale it with a transform shader. Saves messing around with fidgety image maps and you could probably export a terrain out of it, if you softened the edges of the borders some, I'd try a colour adjust shader or a smooth step range to try and smooth the edges out a bit to create a terrain. As it is, it's very sharp and rough so wouldn't displace very nicely without some extra work.

Hey Martin,

I would like to get back to you on this in several days. What you posted looks like it can really help me do something I was planing for this project, or at least help understand how else what I want can be done. I am sure I will have questions for you about it. In the meantime I am concentrating on modeling fundamentals.
Here is an image that you may like with respect to what you posted.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-r_phhodxBUs/Tcf-CWyinHI/AAAAAAAAAAU/GBSSG4D4-38/s1600/d188c1b2f47_labyrinth1.jpg

Also, I was thinking about this: http://xfrog.com/product/LS14.html


It has been eaten.

Dune

You can displace these ornamental bushes procedurally (I did that in the Vlaardingen winter scene, a few years ago), but you can also put thousands of squares on it with a leaf texture, blended by the same procedural map.

TheBadger

Quote from: Dune on April 04, 2012, 02:08:51 AM
You can displace these ornamental bushes procedurally (I did that in the Vlaardingen winter scene, a few years ago), but you can also put thousands of squares on it with a leaf texture, blended by the same procedural map.

Hi Ulco

I had thought about doing that with a wall object, but the problems of getting the walls flush over an uneven terrain killed that idea. Though with plants that sounds perfect.
But what I was struggling to understand is, how do you get the plants to not have trouble at corners and intersections? Will they overlap? and how do I make sure that the plant is alined in the right direction with the path?

What does, "you can also put thousands of squares on it with a leaf texture, blended by the same procedural map." mean?
It has been eaten.

Shigawire

#115
I really like your maze renders so far. Quite an epic maze! :D

I also wonder, purely by curiosity:

Perhaps a maze could be generated procedurally using math functions in TG?

I know the Hilbert sequence is procedural, and produce a labyrinthine patchwork of lines. Problem with the Hilbert sequences is that they are a perfect pattern, and not very random.

Or something like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_generation_algorithm

Dune

QuoteI had thought about doing that with a wall object, but the problems of getting the walls flush over an uneven terrain killed that idea. Though with plants that sounds perfect.

I mean that the 'walls of plants' (the hedges) are no plants, but an upward displaced area (in my case by image map). But if you populate that same area with thousands (millions) of simple squares, rotated by the angle of the displaced wall (you probably need an extra compute normal) you can add a semi-transparent leaf texture on those squares and give the walls more depth and structure.
The fact that it's a displacement hedge ensures it following the terrain.

WAS

#117
I can render at 2800x1368 at 0.9 detail and 9 AAA on my friends TG3, his computer is a beast mind you. But I noticed I can render a image out in less then 12 hours with ray tracing out. With it active, my friend often has to fail my renders because they'd had been rendering a week or more.

So I think, that is your kicker: "Ray trace objects: Yes, Ray trace atmo: Yes, GI surface details: Yes" causing the most slowdown. Even on my demo version with it off sample renders run in minutes compared to hours.

If you turn it off, crank resolution a bit higher, and render, you can add some good effects via Photoshop and downscale and ray tracing wouldn't be visible if it were on or off. Least I've noticed not much a difference with it on our off in highly detailed scenes that have been downscaled. May be wrong though.

bobbystahr

Quote from: jo on March 26, 2012, 04:55:06 AM
Hi Ulco,

Regex is short for "regular expression". Basically it's kind of an advanced type of text searching. My text editor lets you use regular expressions for find and replace. I opened the project in the text editor. Basically what I did was copy and paste the default shaders from one object and then change all the other objects which used those shaders so they all linked to the ones I copied.

I haven't done much with regular expressions before so it took a bit of figuring out.

Regards,

jo

That's quite smart Jo...brilliant even. TG could use a feature that would do that internally as more and more projects seem to need/use image maps and that ivy can be a killer if you use it a lot in a scene. Been there, scrapped the project.
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

WAS

Quote from: bobbystahr on December 19, 2014, 11:17:11 AM
Quote from: jo on March 26, 2012, 04:55:06 AM
Hi Ulco,

Regex is short for "regular expression". Basically it's kind of an advanced type of text searching. My text editor lets you use regular expressions for find and replace. I opened the project in the text editor. Basically what I did was copy and paste the default shaders from one object and then change all the other objects which used those shaders so they all linked to the ones I copied.

I haven't done much with regular expressions before so it took a bit of figuring out.

Regards,

jo

That's quite smart Jo...brilliant even. TG could use a feature that would do that internally as more and more projects seem to need/use image maps and that ivy can be a killer if you use it a lot in a scene. Been there, scrapped the project.

Notepad++ has regular expression as a internal tool. May be worth looking into. Also Windows Grep (preferred) as you can do this to multiple Terragen Projects at once! :D

However, that is a brilliant idea, what if TGF not only had it's note network, but a plain text editor of the profile file which allows custom commenting (like in the network, however more easily vieable then the auto font-scaling which hides text. You can then also add the regular expression functions to allow editing the network on a grand scale, easily. Or even just a "Search..." and "Search and replace..." option in the network in a little toolbar below the network.

I'm sure a text editor of the file world be a lot easier to incorporate then hooking in searching and replacing the network tree with regex. I've had to use this for the crater generator which doesn't allow you to input shaders for your rim and such making them very hard to edit when you have 200+