This scene took approximately 90 minutes on my laptop (msi Apache Pro i7 with an NVidia GTX 960M, vintage 2016). The grass is a round patch that I bought on Turbosquid a while ago, and the buttercups and stones are from Blender Market. The rest of the greenery is from XFrog. I made the dojo and the lanterns in Blender.
(http://www.lilatladera.com/Terragen/dojoFromPath.jpg)
It's far from perfect, but I have learned a great deal and want to start a new scene now.
Questions:
1. Is it possible to lock a camera so it can't be translated? Asking for a dumb friend. ;)
2. I have a couple of light sources inside the dojo, to illuminate the shoji paper windows. Do light sources respect the walls of the object? I ask because there is a lot of light on the back wall facing away from the sun. It might be reflected from slopes off-scene right... or it might be leakage.
You did a good job.
1. You can copy/past (CTRL+D) the camera you want to lock. It won't be locked, but at least you'll have a copy to keep if you screw up the second camera. Switch by attaching it to the render shader and click on the button under the preview 'use current camera', if you want to use it again.
2. It's leaking through the walls. With Path trace that won't be the case. You won't necessarily need lights to light up the paper windows. In the object itself you can use illumination (luminosity) of those particular parts. You won't have the leakage then. If you want a bit of fake lighting differences between windows or parts of windows, use a small scale power fractal into the illumination input, if needed feed it through a transform shader set to world position. If you save the dojo as tgo, and place it elsewhere, you won't have to relocate lights either, so it's much handier.
well done and good advice re: the windows from Dune I've filed away...
Thank you!
Re lighting: Good to know path tracing will eliminate the leakage. The idea of kicking up the luminosity on the shoji paper solves the immediate problem, but smacks of Thomas Kinkade in the long run. I need to test drive that workaround.