Based on Dunes road setup

Started by DocCharly65, May 09, 2017, 01:30:19 AM

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DocCharly65

Fighting against the road ;D
I hope I can smooth the extremly curvy look a bit - at least the middle streaks... too extreme in my eyes.
But fortunately the hazy zoomed look at the starship has exactly the look I wanted...
And amost the complete farm is floating... ;D ... Going on twiggeling...

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Dune

It's warped, so make the smallest size of the warping pf a lot bigger.

DocCharly65

#32
Thanks for the suggestion, Ulco.
I already had solved it by changing settings of the vector displacement shaders, when you wrote. Worked as good - but thanks anyway :)

The street is now as I want it.
I am not so sure if I want the grass area on the right growing into the street. Additionally I'll perhaps add some hazel bushes next to the rail guards... But then I'll have reached a limit. These 6 renders are AA5 and Detail 0.5. They needed app. 6 hours on pixelplow. ($4.59 at power 1.7 for these 6 means it will not be a cheap animation when I start rendering the whole 600 frames)

The amount of pops and instances is at the limit too... 2 bluescreens while working on it (but I must admit I had a second instance of TG open to copy objects and settings...  ;D
But my blockhead just wants that animation with an extreme zoom as the 6 testrenders show (Frames 001, 113, 225, 337 449, 561) :

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Dune

To decrease rendertime you might need to replace further pops by procedural veggies. Less heavy and faster.

DocCharly65

#34
Usually I'd say you're right Ulco.
In this case I found out in tests, that most of the render time is used for the clouds - especially in the zoomed frames (horizontal fov at 1)
But so far I don't want to give up that cloud setting.

The trouble (and bluescreens) with the pops appeared while working on them with another opened TG instance for copying and with many of them shown as textured. Meanwhile I have learned to take care not work on several pops at the same time. Another thing that helps is not to forget pausing the 3D preview render.

When the pops are set and saved into cache files, they don't make trouble any more. Especially since TG4 - Good work, Oshyan and Matt!
But I'll keep my actual pop limit to not coming over the memory limit of 32GB at pixelplow :)
But at the moment they are rendering at maximum 40% memory usage - means, they are no problem.






Hannes

The road is looking better now, although I'd say, that in ...449_1.jpg the road mark is still a bit too warped to my taste.
Another thing came into my mind: it's basically what Ulco said. You could replace the pops further away by procedural stuff, but to me the reason why is, if the fields in the background would look smoother, there would be a better sense of depth.

DocCharly65

Thank you Hannes.

Mhh... strange! I've got the experience that especially more complicated procedural grounds render much slower than objects since TG4.

The bigger problem is that I come much too close to the fields with my zoom. I will try and test a bit using procedurals as fields in future projects but so far I am just not good enough in procedurals for a close look of app. 10-20 meters away (Ok - meanwhile some fake stones I can do quite good ;)  ).

Your other hint: The rest of the warping seems to be the up and down of a quite long part of the road. I can live with that and have even seen this on old country roads several times.

Meanwhile I've got Frame 135 from Pixelplow.
It looks ok so far and rendertimes/costs are lower than I expected.

DocCharly65

Quote from: DocCharly65 on May 28, 2017, 12:23:02 PM
Mhh... strange! I've got the experience that especially more complicated procedural grounds render much slower than objects since TG4.

I thought about that all the afternoon :).
A part of the answer is that with the (for me typical) high coverage of the procedural ground with objects I can set the rendering detail level quite low. So I have minimum calculation efforts for the procedural ground and the fast TG4 rendering of objects.

An extreme example of the opposite is my "Silent Hill interpretation". I need high detail levels of the procedural street with all that color variatioons and fakestones and cracks...



Meanwhile I come to the high zoomed parts of the animation and as I expected the rendertime per frame is getting larger.
Here is what I have so far. It's not in correct sequence but shows the overall look so far.

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zaxxon

I really like the beautiful light and colors of the sky and clouds, especially towards the end. I can see why your render times are what they are, and why this needs a render farm. Excellent work!

Dune

#39
You're right about less render time with many objects, if you can reduce procedural detail. Didn't take that into account.

Great shot, btw. No flickering that I can see either. Did you do this with the settings explained to Dorian (like detail 0.5 AA5...)? Or even lower detail?

DocCharly65

Thank you zaxxon, thank you Ulco,

Yes I had to keep this render at 05./5 The smoothing of AA is necessary anyway but in this case I need the high detail, because the end of the animation will show a shot quite close over the street.

That's the reason why I need high procedural detail on one hand but want to spare procedural details like simulated plants...
The populations are additionally set to be rendered in low quality - I don't know how much this can spare rendertime but it has no negative results so far :)


Besides: The end with the view from the side is a shot I gave up so far but I am thinking about a solution.
I love the clouds details where you can see (I hope you can) that it could be small clouds of dust or sand coming from the next desert.
I gave up this part because I couldn'd find a solution for rendering the seperated spaceship for non-blurred look and keep the sunburst. And at the end of this shot you can see that the amount of blur on the ship is variing with the movement of the camera. But I am thinking about three options as solution:

a.) Perhaps Oshyan / Matt could offer a standalone version of their lighting effects-section - then I could do a postwork with the Terragen-like look.

b.) I do this scene with a camera path (into sundirction, but) where the sun is not on the screen then I could use the "Hannes-tactic ;) )

c.) I use a camera direction where the sun is in my back... I must check which of the last two solutions gives me the more beautiful clouds

Dune

I didn't notice anything that would put me off, to be honest. You're certainly a perfectionist, but I'd say there are limits to being a perfectionist  ;)

Regarding the low quality setting of objects/pops; that doesn't influence anything if you RT objects. It has to do with non-RT object rendering, which we hardly use anymore.

DocCharly65

#42
This small idea gets a bigger scene than I thought  ;)

Some impressions what is happening on my render PC and at pixelplow...

Pixelplow (should finish tonight):
Frames 245 and 400 (of 600)

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This scene will end here (You should already have seen this in a teaser before)

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I have not decided yet if I rerender the animation because the gravity wheel of the serenity is not spinning in those quite "old" renders...  :-\


meanwhile rendering @home on Hyrican i7 32GB:
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Some how I have too much fun doing advertisement for planetside... do you see it already on the truck?  ;D
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...and a very important correction! Though I love the plants of Chris - the groundcovering grasspatch I used here (and in the radio scene is from masonspappy - sorry! and one more thanks for posting the tgo!  :)

Dune

Cool. You need to be sponsored by Planetside  ;)

bobbystahr

It is a most effective logo on the truck...nice implied motion.
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist