I'll close this post off now since I started a new one in Image sharing (with a cylindrical version of the pano as well). Feel free to leave comments there
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1178.0
<Up-Update> Restarted rendering this now that a) I got the sequence rendering working and b) installed the latest TG update. The combination of these two has slightly affected the density shaders of the populations which has repositioned the trees. Also tweaked a few things that were bugging me in the first (and replaced GI with fill lights) Progress should be faster now
Now running an on the fly render and conversion just for the hell of it. Online version will now automatically update until completed.
http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~bernardk/tgdemo/tetons_v6.mov</Up-Update><Update> Render stopped at 12%... Very slow with manual frame changes. I've added a render without objects as a background onto which I'll drop the tiles with objects. The blue gaps in the clouds are due to the use of whole numbers to scale the cloud's density fractal (1,1,3 in this case). I'll be changing the clouds and dropping in the fixed version later (using 1.01, 1.02, 5.02) ((No, appears to be an acceleration cache issue?)).
Concentrated on adding some more grass at the bottom to get a better feel for the model. I like it, even if it is a bit green.
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QTVR (1Mb) </update>I told you I like seeing how far I can push something until it breaks
There are some other potential issues relating to rendering panoramas that I hadn't considered before. The first one that struck me was running out of RAM to render a single frame. I have a lot of objects in my project, and trying to render a large 90° tile with lots of objects usually crashed before the render finished.
I picked the camera angle that looked through the most trees and set about finding a tile size I could render. I ended up with a 10° tile of 100x100 pixels. Setting up the camera keyframes was pretty easy with excel, and a little more work converted the same numbers to a PTStitcher script to stitch the frames. A quick test to check it all worked:
http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~bernardk/tgdemo/pano_10deg.mov (1.9Mb... sorry max. jpeg quality, 3600 pixels wide)
The stitching was not entirely straightforward as 614 temp files were too much for my RAM (614 x 18.5Mb for my 3600x1800 panorama). I split it up into batches of 100 tiles and then merged the output panoramas in Photoshop. A little bit of mucking around but nearly all of it can be semi-automated so it's relatively painless. I'll probably change the PTStitcher script to just output a TIFF panorama for each tile (it includes an alpha) and then create a Photoshop action to merge them together, cutting it down to two steps.
Now all I have to do is render the other 580 frames of my project:
http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~bernardk/tgdemo/tetons001.movThe blue spruce tree in the foreground is slowing down the render at the moment. This population and my grass have reflectivity and translucency set to make them look pretty at the expense of render time.
