Winter Town

[Dune]

A project I'm working on; a Dutch medieval city in winter, based on archeology data. A heck of a lot of work to make all the buildings, these are just 1.5 street, the whole center and wharfs still to come. I'm running into memory problems already, probably the buildings are too detailed. So, I will pull up whole lowpoly blocks in Lightwave, and reduce texture sizes for the more distant houses. And of course there's snow to come on the roofs... This took 1.5 hours at detail 0.5 and AA4 for 2000x1000px.
This project takes up so much time, that I'm probably not in the game for the animation contest, but alas.

---Dune

[FrankB]

why, you could use this scene as a submission, for example. Or one of your previous ones. If there's one guy on this board who has a wealth of interesting scenes already falling out his pockets, it's you

[ra]

This is really nice, I like it. Can't wait to see snow on the roofs. It is definitely worth the time spent.

[Henry Blewer]

Ulco, you are a Master at this. It may be necessary to render the scene/s using clip renders. Or perhaps the 64 bit version will be ready soon. This would solve the RAM difficulty.

[domdib]

Love the ornamental gardens! Superb work as usual.

[otakar]

Holy Shrek! Looks like you solved your tree placement issues. Great building models as well.

And I agree with Frank, a flyover of one of your terrains would be very intriguing...

[Dune]

Thanks, guys, I´m overwhelmed by your compassion. 
If possible I would like to use another commission I´m working on (the Garden of Eternity with labyrinth), but have to ask permission, and hopefully finish it in time (also going away for a couple of weeks in between). Thát would make a great animation...

[dandelO]

Another great scene, Ulco, very, very nice, as we've all come to expect from you. Lovely!

[Dune]

I think my memory concerns are over,  halved all texture jpg's, replaced the roofs by some snowed roofs, so I could loose the extra nodes to get snow on the roofs, and also found that the only tree still had a bark texture of 10MB, which is now some 50kB. I filled half the city with what houses I had, but for variation I'd have to make some more. Just rendered a crop of a total of 4000x2000px, still without soft shadows and low clouds to see how it went. It went quite ok. Will be updated...

By the way, I have permission to use the Garden of Eternity for the contest, so I'll give it some priority. Hope I make it in time...

[Henry Blewer]

It's coming on nicely. The only thing I see odd is the boats. If you defined the canal more they would not seem to be sitting on the ground.

[Dune]

It was the Little Ice Age in that period, so everything is frozen (but no penguins). Two boats actually are sitting on land, it will be a line of wharfs right there (beams, sheds, rubbbish, etc). But it might be nice to have a little open water here and there... some medieval skaters on the ice... lots to do.

[Henry Blewer]

I read about that 'ice age'. A curious time.

[Dune]

An update on this project. Reduced from 2000x1000 which took 36 minutes. Built some more 'houseblocks', and tried to keep files as low as possible. I think there are about 30+ object (copies) or so, all manually placed. Right now another one is running, this time with soft shadows on, but it's using 2.65 GB already. I need to roll out a picture of 5000x2500 at least, later on...
Now I need to make some statues for in the park. Dirt, planks, carts, people and so on need to liven up the empty city, but I guess that'll be a Photoshop job.   

[inkydigit]

looks fantastic, some smoke for the chimneys also, I guess?

[Martchi]

Great work!bravo!