Needles

[PorcupineFloyd]

New object rendering engine rocks! I really like the details... and render times

I've used Walli's pine models.

Postwork:
32bit to 16bit, levels, curves, tone adjustment, sharpening, 16bit to 8bit, convert to sRGB.

Render settings:
Resolution - 3600x2400
Quality - 0.5
AA - 8 (NC)
Ray trace objects - on
GI - 1/3/8 supersample
Hard shadows
Atmosphere/Cloud - 64/358 (no acceleration)

Render time - Almost 10 hours on Q6600 @ 3.2

Bigger version available here (click download).

[Henry Blewer]

I took a peek at this on Deviant. Very good render! I really like the colors in the clouds to.

[Kadri]

Nice 

The objects seems to be melting(?) really better with the backround with the new build.

Kadri.

[PorcupineFloyd]

Yes I've also noticed that having lots of vegatation on the scene with this new engine looks pretty amazing. Everything is sharper but also blends better. Neat update :-)

[moodflow]

I really like the clouds on this one.  Any tips you could share?

[PorcupineFloyd]

Clouds are rather simple.

Take a look at clip file with atmosphere shader + cloud layer.

I think that clouds look good in this particular render because of:

1. Thickness (0.01 density)
2. Quality (4 = 358 samples and no acceleration --> lots of detail + pretty shadows)
3. Coverage gamma at 0.125 which makes clouds more consistent
4. Feature scale close to cloud depth (or even bigger for those massive scale cloudscapes)
5. Lowered sun glow (recovers some detail in highlights)
6. Raised haze to 4500 and made it a big thicker (grey tint in atmosphere and clouds)
and finally
7. Postwork in Photoshop:
a) Levels - adjusted tones independently of each other
b) Curves - general contrast adjustment, shadows brightening and emphasizing on midtones
c) Vibrance - slight touch to colour
d) Selective colour - tinting clouds even more (they developed this nice colour after levels adjustments)

in 90% of my renders I'm always working with 32 bit files. Photoshop offers some basic 32-->16 bit conversions but if you're using software like Photomatix then you don't have to take care about blown up highlights in clouds as you can recover all of them from exr.

Also, doing postwork on 16 bit images (after converting them from 32 bits) gives you good results when sky is involved. You can push tones really high without any banding at all (which is even more important when you're playing with jittering in atmosphere settings).

One more thing - I've used hard shadows on this one as it can lower render times by the factor of 3. If you're not doing any close-ups or scenes where hard shadows would be super-visible then don't use soft shadows. It is especially important when doing something that involves lots of vegetation (ex. grass) from a distance. Vegetation detail will soften (perceptually) shadow detail for you.