Here's a "quick" cloud test with billboard trees. I'm not sure what happened to the trees on top of the ridge but I'm guessing it's my fault as my previous render didn't have them and I had changed some surfacing in between... (square blocks, upper right of centre)
I've made a mask to try and add some mist for the waterfall which I'll try tonight. Then all I need is a way to hack the water fall. I'll have to dig out my Ansell Adams books for my reference pic.... the memory's a bit blurred ;)
Billboarding seems a bit obvious lower-right. Have you done benchmarks comparing the time savings when using billboards? I'd be very curious to see the results.
- Oshyan
I wasn't worried about it being obvious at this stage, I just wanted a single population as a reference. Having watched this render over the best part of a day I'd say that it doesn't really seem to render any faster but it does use less RAM which was the limiting factor for previous large populations i tired. I've removed the trees while I sort out the cloud settings.
Some sort of benchmarking would be handy as a reference though. Time I can do easily enough unattended. My fill lighting benchmarks were done by piping the output from TGDCLI to a text file so that I could go through the log and extract the pre-render and render times. I have some tests planned to calculate distances for setting object render quality and I'll just keep an eye on RAM usage for a couple of them.
I like the composition and lighting. Skip the Ansel Adams books. I still haven't dug out any of my pics (although my best of El Cap hangs where I see it every day). I think there's something to be said for maintaining a bit of artistic license. ;)
BigBen, I like your clouds.
BigBen,
Very nice pic. I have a similar mountain render I created with some really nice cumulostratus (which I created by accident). I'll post it once I get home from work.
Also, were you using the 4 sided billboard object posted from a few weeks ago? Thats the one I'm using.
I've also been doing tons of tests will billboards. As you stated, it saves bigtime on RAM, but doesn't really speed up the rendering, or so I've found. I find it works best for objects that are very small and plentiful, like grasses (up close), or trees (far away).
I kinda wish the population options included X,Y, and Z rotations, which would help as well.
Hey bigben I had a similar "block" problem with 2D cards before, and it was solved by setting the render quality to "very high quality". Didn't seem to slow things down any so it's worth a shot if you can confirm it.
That might explain it. I had dropped the quality to medium from my first renders where it wasn't a problem. At least now I won't have this gnawing at the back of my mind ;). I will run a render later to confirm this.