07 - Innominate Bluffs of the Polyrapt [Falconius]

[Redrobes]

Yes thats superb ! The HDR lighting is very vibrant and realistic - it looks like its doing some kind of radiosity stuff in there. Either that or you have set up your lighting model very well indeed. The side shot down the cliff looks quite real in thumbnail version. Ta for the registration image. I'll get this one put into my local copy of the main map now.

Edit: Note that your WIP doesnt cover all of your region. Might want to keep enough of the chasm to fill to the edge.

Edit2: Just curious, do you know where the noise is coming from. Is it a normal rendering method or are you using something odd like that stochastic ray pathing thingy. Its just that the noise isnt in places I would have expected it to be. Its almost like its missing the fact that its in shadow and rendering the odd pixel fully lit. Most peculiar.

[Falconius]

Thanks guys. I too was surprised how real-ish it looked in the thumb.

Yes thats superb ! The HDR lighting is very vibrant and realistic - it looks like its doing some kind of radiosity stuff in there. Either that or you have set up your lighting model very well indeed. The side shot down the cliff looks quite real in thumbnail version. Ta for the registration image. I'll get this one put into my local copy of the main map now.

Edit: Note that your WIP doesnt cover all of your region. Might want to keep enough of the chasm to fill to the edge.

Edit2: Just curious, do you know where the noise is coming from. Is it a normal rendering method or are you using something odd like that stochastic ray pathing thingy. Its just that the noise isnt in places I would have expected it to be. Its almost like its missing the fact that its in shadow and rendering the odd pixel fully lit. Most peculiar.

Thanks Redrobes. It's all the HDRI which is like the best thing ever, basically plug and play for high quality lighting.

I'm using Cycles for rendering, which is Blender's new native renderer. And it traces light paths. It has always given me lots of noise. There are tweaks I can do to lower it but they all have draw backs so I'm going to wait until I'm doing finish renders until I try and really tackle the noise issue. I'll fix that cut off bit next time round (yay more room!).

[Redrobes]

Ahh right - I didnt know about Cycles. It is a stochasic ray pathing algorithm and it does generate noisy results unless you whack up the number of samples taken to a high degree. No wonder your lighting model is superb ! It really does make for a tremendously realistic result tho - esp with HDR lighting. If you look at the thumbnail, then being downsampled, it loses that noise. So in effect, if you can stand the wait, then render it 4x width and height, then take the result, blur it and resample it back down and it ought to be a whole lot better. Of course it will take forever to render...

Still looks to me tho that those light flecks in the shadowed regions could not possibly be correct so I think blenders cycles has a math bug in it somewhere. I understand why it would be noisy anyway but I think its artificially high noise due to that. If you have bump mapping turned on by using bitmapped textures (like some concrete etc) then make sure the noise frequency is not so high (i.e. tiny bumps) that it would generate weird normals at the ray-surface intersection that would throw the light rays all over the place. If some of the rays are landing into the non shadowed zones then that could be a reason why its generating those flecks and not be a math issue. In effect, what you would be doing is asking for the rock face to be made out of a micro crytalline like surface and those are all the micro glints. I dont know if that is what you have set up and you probably have a handle on the issue. But my tuppence worth of guess there. I have had similar issues with renders in the past with that.

[Falconius]

I'm adding polygons at an astounding rate, so it's taking longer and longer to render since I can't use my GPU (it seems to have memory issues with Cycles). I think I'm up to around 20-30 min for even these small pictures. My samples rate is a 1024, I think I'd double it (at least) for final pics. If I'm still getting noise then well... it'll take some fixing that's for sure. Or I may just cheat and do as you suggest and render larger and squish it.

[Katto]

Just stumbled upon this Guild City Thingy, excellent work so far Falconius!
If you need a normal (or other render relevant) map from a texture image, you could try the 30 day trial version of Bitmap2Material.

[Mouse]

There are still plenty of Districts up for grabs if you want to have a go at one, Katto?

[Katto]

No, thanks Mouse. I really enjoy city maps most, but atm I am doing researches for my next project (non mapping).
Your map is also fantastic, you`re really getting the max out of CC.

[Mouse]

Oh that's a shame, and thanks for the praise. Good luck with your other project

[kacey]

Seeing this on Redrobes thumbnail is crazy, it looks like an aerial photograph, really neat... I wish I knew how to do this.

[Ilanthar]

Hey Falconius, I need your help !

I intend to work a bit my district and you gave me the itch to do a basis in 3D... How high did you set the bridge (in meters)?