Finished the Flowery dealy
Needs to be viewed at high brightness

I've unknowingly cropped about an inch all the way round by mistake, oops, ah well it looks good for it, just wondering how I could have done it without knowing

:-P

Spent all yesterday crashing, reaching some kind of limit in VRay, maybe even the 4gb RAM limit of 32bit address space, but who knows.

I've composed the background render with the previous render of the flowers, so the lighting won't match up and it won't have and shadows, but just to see what it would look like
I'm not liking it at the moment, I\'m hoping that's just because the foreground lighting does'nt gell with the background, but I think I\'m going to have to rethink this.

I think it requires many more vines for it to work, not just 1 spindley one, and I don't think my computer can handle it in a reasonable time frame


Ugh can't get leaves/flowers to look any good

They look all plasticy


This is a bit better


13 Minutes

I may have forgotten to turn on the SKY before rendering this, but all is good it only took 30 minutes

:-)

Now ill be able to compare both the aesthetic improvement and the detriment caused to render time by the HDR lighting

I think I\'m going to remove the whole bottom vine, where It's framing the bottom of the image. It's obstructing too much and it looks like shit cus of the low poly count, I could make it higher poly


Took 35 Minutes, so the HDR sky did'nt add much to the render time at all. I've got some odd black leaves now, and the red vines don't go too well, just makes a big red fuzzy mess.

Getting a bit more abstract now with my flowery visions *shrugs*




It needs some kind of backdrop my first thoughts are putting it inside some tunnel like hole that surrounds the swirly path of the vine

I draw by hand a path around the shape of the vine and Lathe it to form the following dirty hole:

Subpoly displacement is awesome! (and slow)

Add some specular and moss grass type thing, as mud surrounding flowers isn't particularly cute

I've created some breaks in the outerwall to let light in and make it more interesting


A lighting test with displacement turned off, trying to position a sun type light to cast a shadow + strong burnt out glow on the grassy side, the logic being moss/grass would grow in the sun lit areas and not in the dark shaded part.



Tweaked the lighting by changing the environment map to a sunset type HDR and changing It's hue. Also changed the sun light to an area light so it casts a softer shadow. The HDR is flooding light in at a horizontal angle now which is lighting up the hole on the right, which is something I wanted. The GI Quality is here is lowest hence the weird blue dots on the left.


1 hour 20 in on lowest GI!!

This is with the Displacement on and It's killing the render times when in combination with GI, I don't even want to think how slow it will be with the vine/leaves turned on. And to think, I was planning on adding hairs to the moss to make it grassy... forget that! my computer will esplode!

I think I have rather incorrect GI settings, for use with sub-poly displacement.. I have some ideas! (reads manual)


3 hours 25 in..... definitely need some optimizations

render with GI = 10 minutes, render with Displacement = 10 minutes, render with Displacement and GI = infinity

Would help if the manual for this was both complete and not in engrish:

"This will result inpoorer results of course but nrings speed advantages. Specially for
previews you can turm of the seondary engine, or if you have scenes that not at all
use any glossy effects."

ah well that's beta software for you.