15 miles on the Erie Canal

Started by sboerner, January 25, 2018, 11:05:04 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

bobbystahr

Quote from: DocCharly65 on November 22, 2018, 03:42:53 AM
! Tried to count the bolts of the bridge - gave up ;)


you too heh heh, I tried as well
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

Jo Kariboo

Congratulations, it's a very well done and impressive project!

sboerner

Thanks, Jo.

I had a bit of a scare earlier this week. The working file stopped . . . working. My worst nightmare. I spent a day tearing the scene down, trying to find the culprit, but it didn't seem to be anything in particular. Once it reached a certain level of development, it would crash TG on open. No delay, no warning.

Ended the day feeling very disheartened. (There goes a year's work. Oh, well.  :() But the next morning something told me to check out the painted shaders. There were several in the scene. A forum search turned up several references to painted shaders causing problems similar to mine. Turns out they are best used in moderation. So I spent a couple of hours converting them to images, and the scene is now up and running again.

I keep daily backups, so in the end just lost a couple of hours' work.

New rendering of reconstructed scene with a few more details and an early cloud test. Altocumulus Castellanus, out of the box. They have a nice effect on the foreground-background contrast of the lighting, which is now very close to where I want it.


otakar

Wow, what a tour de force! Glad you found the issue. What are you planning on doing with the final render? Is this a commercial project?

Dune

Oh, that must have been horrifying. But how did you find the culprit when TG crashed every time? You checked the tgd itself in a text editor? That's something I'm always afraid of when going on and on adding stuff, but it never happened so far.

One (last) question/remark; do the barrels have metal rings? They look so bland (if that's the right word). Maybe also dirty them up....

The whole image is absolutely a masterpiece, I certainly hope to see it in great detail one day (even with the watermark, which I well understand).

DocCharly65

Some minutes ago I watched "Mission Impossible - Fallout"   ---   But the story about your crashes scared me a lot more!
Happy to hear you found the solution!

sboerner

QuoteOh, that must have been horrifying. But how did you find the culprit when TG crashed every time? You checked the tgd itself in a text editor?

I opened the file in Oxygen (an XML editor) and did side-by-side comparisons with earlier versions to see what might be going on. But I didn't try to make any changes. The solution was simpler – I keep a folder of daily backups and kept backing up until I found a file that opened. Since it was a holiday week here I hadn't been making many changes, so even though I had to go back 3-4 days I didn't lose much work.

The final clue was "good" files would often go bad when they were resaved with a "Save as." There was mention of this in one of the forum posts. This happened even when no changes were made before resaving.

Once I had a good file I stripped everything out except the painted shader nodes and used an orthographic camera to convert them into images. Then I opened the good file again and replaced the painted shader nodes with the image maps. (The resulting file was 70 percent smaller!)

Painted shader nodes are great for tweaking displacements, but from now on I'll use them more sparingly and not at all for color masks.

QuoteSome minutes ago I watched "Mission Impossible - Fallout"   ---   But the story about your crashes scared me a lot more!

Yeah, the part that worried me was that I'd hit some kind of wall – memory limitation or something – that would prevent further work on the project. It was pretty discouraging at first.

QuoteWow, what a tour de force! Glad you found the issue. What are you planning on doing with the final render? Is this a commercial project?

Thank you! My plan is to use this as a proof of concept for a series of historical illustrations. I hope it becomes a commercial project.

bobbystahr

Whew...I know that feeling. And thanks for the reminder that Painted shaders  are convertible and much smaller size as such. I don't use them as much as I used to but may change my process given your success when I do.
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

Dune

Thanks for explaining, Steve. Sweaty, tense work, I can imagine, not very nice. I'm sure you can get good commissions out of this, seeing the amount of dedication and eye for detail. Hat off!

sboerner

Thanks, Ulco. There's no way this project would have gotten off the ground without this forum. The suggestions and guidance you and others have provided have been a tremendous help. The project has become a graduate-level course in Terragen . . . soaking it up and taking notes . . .

sboerner

#250
New update. The fleet is finished and in place, three unrigged boats and a steamer to provide propulsion. The steamer is based on an actual boat that worked on the canal from 1883 to 1919. Also a small flock of Canada geese heading south for the winter.

Just a few more models to go. A few days ago I learned that the original lyrics to the song were "15 years on the Erie Canal." At the rate this project is going, that perhaps would be a more appropriate title for this thread!  :P


archonforest

Dell T5500 with Dual Hexa Xeon CPU 3Ghz, 32Gb ram, GTX 1080
Amiga 1200 8Mb ram, 8Gb ssd

Oshyan

Nice update! It's definitely coming together now, getting close eh?

- Oshyan

bobbystahr

Better and better with every update...keep em coming .
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

Dune

Fantastic again! This is going to be really awesome and worth a huge museum backdrop. The goose is really good too; did you make it yourself?