The Rough-Hewn Shore

[schmeerlap]

This scene is inspired in large part by the recent "Displacement of Near Vertical Surfaces Problem" thread: thanks to Martin and Robert for their input there.
I felt the scene needed a wee bit more colour, so I found a rusty, bashed in oil drum on Sketchfab (thanks to Sunbox Games for that) and bunged it into this rather dreich Scottish landscape.

[mhaze]

Excellent! The rocks are great

[mhaze]

How did you manage the seaweed?

[schmeerlap]

Thanks Mick. I'm guessing you're seeing seaweed in an Image Map I used for the rock texture (a dark ribbon-like fissure in the rock texture). Hey, but if you're seeing seaweed, all well and good 

[Stormlord]

Really excellent rocks !!!
The rock and the whole atmosphere is great. The old fuel canister is also a nice addition, which pimps the whole scene.
For my taste a  little bit too dark, but a very cool image.

STORMLORD

[schmeerlap]

For my taste a  little bit too dark

welcome to my world (the dreich, drab, cold, windy, sunless West coast of Scotland) 

[pclavett]

Nice rocks indeed  !

[Tangled-Universe]

That looks interesting. The lighting is kind of overcast, but also not really.
The rocks look good and I also like the patch of fog. I think it could be a bit denser/less transparent for a bit more drama.
How long did it take to render? I feel a bit of an itch to up the AA. Like detail 0.6 with AA8 or AA10 and deferred (think this is deferred already though)?

[schmeerlap]

Thanks Martin. The scene took 3hrs 15 min to render with the standard renderer. AA 6, Microdetail 0.9, both defer checkboxes ticked. I revisited the rocks, made a few adjustments, and made a crop render over a section of the rocks with AA 10, and a reflective shader to get a wetter feel to the rocks, doing that bumped the render time up for that crop from 12 min to 48 min, with not much more bang for my buck in terms of noticeable improvement. Hopefully the new computer I purchased recently will be returned to me repaired (power supply developed a fault soon after I received it) and I'll be able to radically reduce the time of my renders.

[Tangled-Universe]

Ok I see.
If deferred rendering is enabled the quality of the shader calculations are determined by the AA setting.
The consequence of this is that you don't need old-style high detail, like 0.9. That settings creates subpixel sized micropolygons which all need to be sampled at AA8 or AA10. That's a lot of overhead.
That's the reason I suggested to render with detail 0.6 instead. In the majority of cases this creates enough geometry detail and the remainder is for AA to work on.

[Dune]

For rough stuff like these rocks even detail 0.5 and AA6 (my standard) would do in my view, and beware of RT reflections in very displaced areas! Especially with path rendering.
I just did a rippled mud scene; complete RT render took 16 minutes, PT renderer was halfway after 2 hours. For PT rendering I'd wish there was an option to force non ray/path-traced reflections...

[Tangled-Universe]

For displacements like these with fine strata rendering with detail 0.5 is borderline sufficient and likely insufficient, but it might be worth trying.
The key message is that 0.9 in combination with deferred rendering is overkill.

[schmeerlap]

Thanks Martin, Ulco for your expert advice on render settings. I will seriously consider rendering with higher AA and lower Micropoly Detail henceforth.

[Tangled-Universe]

Another advice I can give is to first design your displacements and only have a grey lambert shader as surface shader.
This renders fast and gives you a good idea of how the light interacts with your surfaces and it also allows you te explore which detail level you need.
Do some small crop renders with AA8 and detail 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6...at some point you'll find there's no added quality anymore, so the setting before that becomes the detail setting.
The reason I'm pushing for AA8 during testing is that you would not like to mistake AA noise for actual surface detail in a similar fashion to how film grain also perceptually adds sharpness while it technically isn't.
If I were to choose between too low surface detail vs too low AA I'd go for surface detail, because shaders still look better with high AA and also vegetation, clouds and shadows.

Another workflow tip is to have your displacement shaders as child layers to distribution shaders or surface layers, so that the 'main chain' of your network is a chain of distribution/surface shaders.
The benefit of this is that you can enable colour output in all your displacement shaders and treat them all separately for masking and driving colour perfectly aligned for that particular displacement shader.
This gives far more coherent texturing results than creating rocks with PF's and then applying a completely different noise pattern over it. If you have your displacements in the main chain of your network you can still derive colour, but you for every 'level' in your network you would first have to subtract all preceding nodes first to extract the colour/noise for that particular node. Therefore it's much easier to 'side chain' it all using distribution/surface shaders and work from there in an independent manner.

[schmeerlap]

first design your displacements and only have a grey lambert shader as surface shader.

So you're only using the Lambert shader in this instance to check how your displacements are reflecting light, and then disabling it before a final render, thus enabling all other colours in surface shaders / power fractals / image maps to take effect. Or, are you using Lambert shaders for colouring throughout the scene instead of colouring with power fractals and image maps.