Crossing the marsh

[sboerner]

Work in progress. More models will be added to the foreground to show the excavation in progress. Original landscape was a DEM that has been landscaped to remove modern artifacts and reset the date to 1822. For scale, the pile drivers are 4 meters tall and the canal channel is about 20 meters wide.

Have to say that populating a relatively flat, large landscape like this was more difficult than I imagined.

[Kadri]

...

Have to say that populating a relatively flat, large landscape like this was more difficult than I imagined.

Ulco is one who knows this quite good posssibly

Looks good.

[WAS]

Wow. It looks great so far. Love the look of the marshes. Very realistic imo.

[sboerner]

Ulco is one who knows this quite good posssibly

Agree. He makes it look easy, which is not.

Wow. It looks great so far. Love the look of the marshes. Very realistic imo.

Thanks, Jordan.

[WAS]

Almost wish TG could bake LODs and use them dynamically at a distance. Would probably help ram usage and render time, and I doubt one would notice with it being so distant.

[Dune]

Are those background trees procedural 'bumps' or real trees? I use both for distance, but speaking of LOD's; I have a set of low-poly trees that I mainly use for really far out there. Faster to load, even over areas of 20k or so. With no mountains to hide the difference, you'd have to do a gradual fade by multiplying by distance shader or so.

Looks great, btw. Marshes are fun to make.

[sboerner]

Thanks, Ulco. Those are low-poly trees but still fairly large. I haven't run any comparison tests but I've never noticed a difference in rendering times with low- vs. high-poly objects. Just differences in load time. The renderer blasts right through the top of this image, which contains hundreds of thousands of objects. Only slows down when it hits the middle and foreground with water and other reflective surfaces, and closer objects.

Are loaded objects kept in memory? Might be a reason to use low-poly objects, though I've never run into any problems there either (with 32GB RAM).

[Dune]

I think they are. I also think high-poly trees/objects need more calculation with all the different angles of leaves, translucencies, e.g. If it's simpler, I suppose the calculation is simpler/faster too. By I'm not a tech guy, more the experimentation type

[mhaze]

Excvellent render and an interesting subject.

[Hannes]

Great!! And I had to think of Ulco in the first second I saw the thumbnail.

[DocCharly65]

wow that is a great project again! Looks good so far!
and I had the same thoughts like Hannes

[sboerner]

And I had to think of Ulco in the first second I saw the thumbnail.

Thanks, Hannes and Doc. I consider that high praise indeed.

Here is a crop of a high-res rendering. The full rendering is 3840 px wide, AA = 10 and filter = Catmull-Rom. At this resolution CR filter seems to work very well. At lower resolutions, however, it seems oversharp and Mitchell-Netravali works better.

I am going to have to put this project on the shelf for now. Historically, the contractors had to use manual water pumps to keep the channel drained so work could go forward. I am having a lot of trouble finding reference material on those pumps. In 1822 this would have been a remote, inaccessible area, so whatever machinery they used would have to be portable and was probably fairly primitive. If anyone has suggestions on where to find information on this I would much appreciate it.

[Dune]

Intriguing those pumps. I've seen pictures of huge primitive pumps in middle eastern countries, and always wanted to model something like it. Never got to it.
I guess you need local information, but there's a lot of different 'machines' out there. Great stuff. I hope you find what you're looking for. It would prrobably have been something driven by a huge wheel and horses.

[sboerner]

Thanks, Ulco. These are great. The third one (another windwaterpump) looks like something out of Riven.

They used horse-powered pumps elsewhere on the line. But here, because of the wet terrain (and quicksand) they could not uses horses at all. At least that is my understanding. So probably manual machines.

This is the most likely contraption I've been able to find so far. It appears in an 1822 book published by an English inventor, James White.

Trying to confirm that machines like this might have been made on this side of the Atlantic.

[luvsmuzik]

All very cool! Doing my own little research, I discover plumbing done using wood stave piping. We have truly had some creative people in this old world of ours.