Moon Over Little Falls

Started by sboerner, May 18, 2021, 11:10:47 AM

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WAS

Love this scenes evolution process. You are great with composition. I inspire to be this good. Can't wait to see what you start next.

Dune

Wonderful, what more can I say. Everything fits very nicely together and tells a complete story. Lighting is very subtle, the puddles on the dirt track are great (not for them, though). I thoroughly enjoy this and appreciate all the work that has gone into 'just' the one image.... though you could always change light and camera for a different take on this.

Thanks for sharing your road to perfection. Too little of that here :(

Hannes

Really amazing! It's such a pleasure to dive into your image. This is indeed outstanding.

sboerner

Thanks, guys. It seems that I pick up something new with each project. This time it was ZBrush, an application I tried to avoid but now wonder how I ever managed without. And always learning new things with Terragen, of course. All the help and advice on this forum have been invaluable.

This one set a record for rendering time -- the original 6,000-pixel frame took almost 158 hours. MPD was 0.5 and AA was 10 (with customized sampling) to reduce noise in the water and V3 clouds. (Tested many combinations first.) Most of the water surface is a single sphere displaced as needed, with additional planes for the puddles. The render was divided over several tiles that took from 8 to 32 hours each, depending on the amount of water, the surface angle, and displacements. The slowest part was the bypass flume at left, next to the wooden crib, because of the low angle of the upper surface and the small displacements of the inclined surface. The rendering time may have been shortened by disabling water transparency, but I think that would have changed its appearance in the near foreground, around the boat. I don't mind waiting. Not too much anyway.

Dune

Wow, that's a long wait! Especially small displacements and reflections and transparency cost a lot in PT. But it was worth it!

sboerner

I think so, too. I did reduce the ray detail multiplier (to 0.1 or 0.15, I don't remember) because the underwater surfaces aren't important here. I understand that setting also affects some shadows but it doesn't seem to have affected anything else in the scene.

sboerner

One advantage of doing tiles is that I can usually render overnight and use the machine during the day. This time I just let it run straight through.

WAS

Quote from: sboerner on November 16, 2021, 01:19:39 PMOne advantage of doing tiles is that I can usually render overnight and use the machine during the day. This time I just let it run straight through.
I can't wait until TG can store a render process as a cache file to return to later.

Though if you do pause a render Windows or Terragen will clear render RAM usage leaving it only the TGD instance of RAM will be used. Usually this bring my system down to only like 35% ram usage to do othet stuff all day.


sboerner

Thanks, Kadri!


QuoteI can't wait until TG can store a render process as a cache file to return to later.
Agree, though using tiles doesn't take much setup and works fine.


It's also insurance against power interruptions, which we get quite often around here for some reason. The power usually just goes out for a few seconds but that's enough to wipe out any running processes. As I was making a new rendering of this (had a few fixes  :) ), this actually happened. So instead of losing 120+ hours of rendering time I lost just two.

Jo Kariboo

Very beautiful image with an incredible amount of work. Congratulations!

sboerner