Mohawk's 360 scenes

[Mohawk20]

So I'm happily rendering away 5 pov's of my Hanging valley scene, but after a few renders (turned on while being away) I'm in the position to view the progress more regularly. Now I see that the rendering process is very inefficient in this scene! Every square it's first the sky (that will be behind the terrain, a cliff face), then the mountains in the background, with trees (which will be behind the cliff face), and then the top of the cliff will be rendered, with the trees on top (which will be obscured by the cliff face due to the low camera pov). Finally the cliff face and water are rendered, right over everything that has been rendered before. All these hours wasted by rendering stuff that's not visible anyways. That has cost me 4 hours per render, on a dozen renders so far...
(So you can imagine why I'm very happy with TeamViewer for Android.)

Why can't the renderer work front to back?

[Dune]

I've been wondering about that as well from time to time, but I guess it would mean a complete overhaul of the render engine, if it's even possible.
One thing that often helps when doing water is setting the sorting bias of the lake (or lake plane/sphere) to some huge minus number.

[Mohawk20]

One thing that often helps when doing water is setting the sorting bias of the lake (or lake plane/sphere) to some huge minus number.

I've never bothered to look at that setting... What is the sorting bias for, what does it do?

[Dune]

It sorts out what to do first, biasing againt one or another thing to render first or later, as I understood. So if you give it a -1000000 number, it will render the water kind of last, afaik.

[Oshyan]

Dune is essentially correct. We do hope to have some optimizations in place for better render "sorting" optimization/approaches in the future. But it's not always possible (or at least easy) to know *before rendering* what is in front of what. The very process of rendering is often what determines this (i.e. the exact displacement and position of a terrain or object, etc. is often determined at render time because it's computed on-demand).

- Oshyan

[Mohawk20]

Very happy with the extra time! I was searching for an old file to be my last entry, but then I came across something else I couldn't ignore... My first rockface that actually looks realistic, made from scratch, of which I'm very proud ofcourse.
[attach=1]

I also did a version where the canyon walls are made of water... Don't know if that should be an entry. Would be a single POV then, due to rendertime. (This one didn't finish because of time issues...)
[attach=2]

[Dune]

Goodlooking rock, looks ancient. Perhaps some ancient rockdrawings would give them a story as well.

[Kadri]

I like the rocks.

[TheBadger]

I like that crazy lighting over the path, image. OR at least the idea it shows if not the test render

[AP]

Neat Slot Canyon there. Maybe erode it a bit and some Geoglyphs is a neat idea.

[Jo Kariboo]

Perfect rocks !!! ... Is it from TU canyon ?

[Mohawk20]

Perfect rocks !!! ... Is it from TU canyon ?

Nope, made from scratch, to long ago to remember how to do it again quickly... Have to study this file again and definitely save the clip file!

Canyon shape was easy: 2 displaceable cubes, and 1 powerfractal.

[Mohawk20]

So I'm gratefully using the extra time to make one of my entries even better by adding grass objects. However, to have all 5 pov's look the same, I use a large population area. But the internal grass clump needs to be small so it can go on the hill without spilling over or sticking out. This means a LOT of instances. I let the computer crunch away at it overnight, just to come back and find low memory errors, the screen resolution set back to 640x480, and noticing in taskmanager that TG has a memory commit size of 32 Gb RAM (I have 12 Gb installed). Don't know if some of that is supposed to be virtual memory, but I don't think so, with all the errors...
How can make this scene look as good as possible without crashing my slightly above average machine?

[Dune]

If you can figure out how much grass will really be visible from all POV's you could use several small pops of the same, like a mozaik of squares, all on locations that slightly intersect, and cover all visible areas. You can link to one object from all pops' internals. For further distances you could gradually go into procedural grass.

[Mohawk20]

For further distances you could gradually go into procedural grass.

The procedural grass, is that the Internal Gras Clup population? Or am I missing a shader that works like the fake stones?