Elven Village Inn

Mohawk20 · October 12, 2009, 12:51:41 PM

I downloaded Chikako's Elven Village Inn and Elven Village Dock from here and here a while ago, and decided it was time to try it.

Then I decided a statue would be nice in front of it, maybe standing on a pedestal/fountain.
So I made a Fairy figure in poser and exported. I textured it with only a water shader to create a crystal effect.
The fountan I made in 3DsMax. Just a tube and a cylinder with curved taper modifiers.

You can view images from early testing up to now in this Ashundar thread.
Below is the newest version with road (a painted shader with displaced voronoi pattern), which I made a bit lighter in PhotoShop.

aymenk2003 · October 12, 2009, 04:09:20 PM

Nice composition ...how did you do the light from the the house ,?...

NKAID...

Mohawk20 · October 12, 2009, 04:51:59 PM

Placed 3 lightsources in the object by hand. Bit of trial and error.
I could have opened the model in Max and create an extra object so the lights are always fixed in position.
Maybe I'll do that later anyway for future scenes.

I'm planning to animate this scene, but that will be a long project, as frames will take quite a while to render, even at half detail.
It's going to be an eclipse by a moon with an atmosphere.
That's rendered by a lot of people at different stages of TG2 development, but it's never been animated, so that should be cool to see.
I am considering adding a magic effect (just a simple extra light) at the darkest point of the eclipse, that will result in the original textures of the statue fade back onto the object (I think by using a merge shader), so the statue will come to life.
Rendering a 360 degree scene after the eclipse will give me a basis for Image Based Lighting in poser, so the statue can actually come to life.
But it's just an idea so far...

Henry Blewer · October 12, 2009, 05:31:09 PM

It's a nice model. Are you going to add any plants? Unfortunately it will add to render times.

Mohawk20 · October 12, 2009, 05:44:12 PM

Grass is rendering right now.
Maybe some trees in the background later.

rcallicotte · October 13, 2009, 09:02:01 AM

Good job. I like the lighting and, whether you meant to do this or not, the sense of being in a miniaturized world. I'm not sure why I got that impression exactly, but I do like the setup and enjoy what you've done.

inkydigit · October 13, 2009, 01:43:07 PM

nice job, love the pathway, add some 'status symbol' chariots and you have a winner!

TheBlackHole · October 13, 2009, 06:18:55 PM

WOW!

Mohawk20 · October 13, 2009, 06:29:27 PM

Quote from: TheBlackHole on October 13, 2009, 06:18:55 PM
WOW!

Care to elaborate on that?

Problem with this scene is that when grass is added it's very heavy on RAM, like 3Gb, which is on the limit of an 32-bit app, even in 64-bit os.
So animating will be tricky, as the render bucket will be full after rendering like 4 frames or so.
But first I have to finish adding all the scene elements... so when I'm happy with the grass, I add some trees, and then change the sun position to get an eclipse.

Patience is key!

Mandrake · October 13, 2009, 10:12:45 PM

Problem with this scene is that when grass is added it's very heavy on RAM, like 3Gb, which is on the limit of an 32-bit app, even in 64-bit os.
So animating will be tricky, as the render bucket will be full after rendering like 4 frames or so.
Patience is key!
[/quote]

Depending on where you go with the camera, you could remove a ton of polys by deleting the back of the house.

Mohawk20 · October 14, 2009, 03:00:50 AM

The house isn't that large on RAM, only 35 Mb, so that's not the problem.
The problem is 5 populations of small grass objects, instanced millions of times...

Zairyn Arsyn · October 14, 2009, 08:35:16 AM

the elven village inn sorta reminds me of one of those inns in oblivion, just with trees.

Mohawk20 · October 19, 2009, 01:28:20 PM

Here's a problem for ya!
I've seen quite a few eclipse renders in TG2 in the past. Some moons had an atmosphere, some didn't.
But I don't remember ever seeing any bit of extra atmo noize.

Look at the render below.
Planet2atmo: 256 samples
Planet1atmo: 128 samples
Render detail: 0.5
AA: 4
Atmo RayTrace Shadows: off

There shouldn't be this much noize should there?
Is there a noize bug in the program?
I'm not happy about this result... is there something I can do about it, or is Matt the only one who can fix this?

Whatever the case, this took almost 50 hours to render, so no animation of this scene!

reck · October 19, 2009, 04:30:01 PM

wow now that is noisy. Maybe you can raise the samples to 1000 or 2000?

Sorry don't have any sensible suggestions.

Kadri · October 19, 2009, 04:55:33 PM

I don't know TG2 much. But maybe it has to do with the internal render settings in night. Maybe there is or is not a way for this. Matt will say something if it is so.

This is not what you are after...But have you tried a fake night render(make a day scene and dim it)? .With exr output it will easier to do i think and who knows maybe faster too

Kadri.