Our Tiberium Future

[Gforce]

I've been trying to make some kind of tribute to the last command and conquer game. The scenery and artwork is amazing. I'm not too impressed by the transparency of the crystal structures. Does anyone have and advice on how to make more crystalline displacements?

[TheBlackHole]

I have an idea, but I haven't tried it: Populate rock objects all over the place and assign them a water shader with all the wave and roughness type stuff turned to 0. Change the colors if you want. Make sure you have them scaled up to a huge size and thus spaced pretty far, then set the population area much, much larger. It's gonna quadruple your render time, but it might work.

[Gforce]

I have an idea, but I haven't tried it: Populate rock objects all over the place and assign them a water shader with all the wave and roughness type stuff turned to 0. Change the colors if you want. Make sure you have them scaled up to a huge size and thus spaced pretty far, then set the population area much, much larger. It's gonna quadruple your render time, but it might work.

That works extremely good, Thanks for the great advice. Here's a preview, sorry for the quality but it is very render intensive.

[leafspring]

I like the second one. It really reminds me of the Tiberium crystals. Within the right setting, they could make a great scene.

[Kadri]

It looks promising , Gforce  I wonder how long it will take to render?

[Gforce]

It looks promising , Gforce  I wonder how long it will take to render?

]
Looks like the render time is going to be very long at least 24 hours. My settings aren't that high but the detail is at 1. I'll see if i can tone down the displacements while still maintaining the crystal look.

[Kadri]

I think  "detail at 1" is a little high . But i am not sure with these crystals .
Do small crop renders at 0.7 - 0.8 or so and compare them Gforce .

And maybe read the render settings recommendations  ones again.
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=6442.0

Someone who did render such objects could help too here ??

[TheBlackHole]

Render times for this stuff are extremely high. I once tried to do a crystal scene with fake stones in the place of rock objects, and reflective shaders instead of water shaders, but it's still basically the same thing. Rendered @ 640x480, quality 0.5, everything pretty much default except the terrain and crystals. Displacements looked great, but it took over 5 hours to render. Can't post the original image because when my computer crashed ( http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7960.0 ) and my hard drive got screwed up so bad I had to reinstall Windows, that render was deleted.

[Gforce]

Yeah it still takes a long time at .5 detail but its tolerable. It took 9 hours for this crop.

[inkydigit]

Yeah it still takes a long time at .5 detail but its tolerable. It took 9 hours for this crop.

wow thats tough, looks great though!

[Zairyn Arsyn]

looks pretty good! its a big improvement than the last crystal render, i'm sure it was worth the time...

[leafspring]

Indeed a nice result. 

[Gforce]

Thanks for the encouraging comments. Here's a render of just the landscape.

[Henry Blewer]

I like the plain landscape. Nice and cloudy. The valley floor looks great. Nice.

[Gforce]

Well I've decided to scrap this project after somebody (who won't admit it) closed my 60+ hour render. This project just isn't worth that much time.I even only rendered it at night and got up early in the morning to pause it. The worst thing is I know it would have been done this morning but someone decided instead of closing the program they would just log off my profile and therefore not save the temp files.Come on there's a freaking pause button! I'll attach the file so if someone else wants to try to finish the scene.       
ps: I was rendering .75 quality with low atmo samples and 1/1 gi.