I Just Wanted to Post an Image Thread

[Rokket]

Oops! That was the wrong one. This is the new one. I thought I had deleted that one above.

 

[Rokket]

Displacement map. You'll have to tweak the amount.

 

[quietrob]

Nicely done and thank you. As well as thanking you for Sasha. I didn't know they finished Project E! I'm still restoring files but once I finish, I'll add the image and displacement map. I have Photoshop 6. It should be able to handle GIMP files or this JPG file. Thanks again for both!

 

[eclark1894]

Nicely done and thank you. As well as thanking you for Sasha. I didn't know they finished Project E! I'm still restoring files but once I finish, I'll add the image and displacement map. I have Photoshop 6. It should be able to handle GIMP files or this JPG file. Thanks again for both!

Project E is still a work in progress. You can find out how far along he is though. He stops by the Smith Micro forums quite a bit.

 

[quietrob]

Project E is still a work in progress. You can find out how far along he is though. He stops by the Smith Micro forums quite a bit.

I wonder if Sasha going to wipe that out. Have you seen the Sasha Promo's? It supposedly wipes out the need for all of the "Fix" morph packages that vendors have put out over the years.

 

[Rokket]

I played with her for a little bit. I didn't do much beyond loading her on the stage and trying out some skin textures. I attempted to load the Amarseda hair, but it looked like a hot mess. I don't know if it's something I did or what. I will try it again after awhile and let you know what happens.

 

[quietrob]

I'll give it a try after I finish moving stuff. It is SOOOOO SLOW. At least I have a system for getting back the missing files.

 

[Rokket]

I set the pixel samples to 6, and let it render until I had 20 passes done. How come everything but the skin is rendering out so nice? I had the thing set up pretty high.

 

[eclark1894]

Are you using EZ skin by Snarlygribbly? Can't recommend it enough.

 

[Miss B]

I never use lower than 10 samples, and often more likely 20 samples. Also, I don't stop a render before it's done, though you're probably just in WIP/testing mode, so yeah I might not let it finish in that case.

BTW, are you using Branched Path Tracing, because I always uncheck that, and check Progressive Refinement. I don't have a GPU, so with CPU only, I find this gives me better/quicker results.

 

[Rokket]

Are you using EZ skin by Snarlygribbly? Can't recommend it enough.

Yes, I have EZSkin 3. I even use it on the PP11 characters...

 

[Rokket]

I never use lower than 10 samples, and often more likely 20 samples. Also, I don't stop a render before it's done, though you're probably just in WIP/testing mode, so yeah I might not let it finish in that case.

BTW, are you using Branched Path Tracing, because I always uncheck that, and check Progressive Refinement. I don't have a GPU, so with CPU only, I find this gives me better/quicker results.

I have Brached Path Tracing checked and Progressive Refinement is also checked. I'll experiment with the settings an see where it leads me.

 

[Miss B]

OK, I've just found using only Progressive Refinement works a whole lot faster for me.

 

[Rokket]

I found it to be faster, but the quality isn't up to par with Branched Path Tracing checked. I ran out of patience and stopped it again. I had let it get about a third of the way through the render (10 samples). The quality of the render wasn't the same as if I would have stopped a render with Branch Path Tracing checked. I will try it again after my laptop cools down. The old girl starts choking when she gets hot...

 

[Miss B]

OK, not everyone's computer is the same. Do you have a GPU, because that would make a difference. This old thing doesn't, so I prefer to not use BPT.

It also depends how busy a scene is. One I did with SuperFly and a HDRi setup with Snarly's EZDome took me 3 hours, but then I was still playing with BPT, so not sure how long it would take with the current render settings I use now. Hmmmmm . . .

 

[Rokket]

I have the NVIDIA GeForce GT 230M card.

It's old but still viable... for now.

 

[Miss B]

Ahhhh yes. My old dual core Dell had an nVidia card, though I don't remember the specifics.

Unfortunately it died suddenly, and my current replacement is a quad core with full hyperthreading, but only has an integrated Intel CPU.

 

[seachnasaigh]

@Rokket & @Miss B : Progressive Refinement and Branched Path Tracing are not mutually exclusive. I usually render in Superfly with both engaged.

Progressive Refinement gives you a relatively quick overall view, enabling you to spot gross errors in lighting or tiling scale, etc. It incurs a minor cost in render time compared with rendering tiles.

Branched Path Tracing uses rays more efficiently; when an "interesting" area is encountered by the render engine, it throws more rays at that specific difficult area, without wasting extra rays on simple areas. This enables you to get a render to clean up with fewer overall samples, so it generally saves render time for a given level of finished render quality.
BPT will frequently cause a GPU render to fail due to a difficult tile taking so long to complete that the render engine thinks it has crashed/failed. But for CPU rendering, BPT is great!

 

[Miss B]

I may have to retry rendering with BPT, though I haven't been disappointed when rendering with just PR. Then again, the other day I was rendering with it, but my samples were up to 40, so I guess that would make a difference for sure, and I wasn't rendering a whole scene, which makes a difference as well.

 

[seachnasaigh]

Lothlorien progress:

I occasionally see this Superfly shading artifact (look at the streambank). I have checked the geometry and checked it again. Normals are consistent, etc. I think it is a bug/quirk in Superfly, so I don't think I *can* fix it. I *did* rework the terrain geometry so that it will behave if subdivided, and subD seems to take care of the odd shading artifact.


If you make renders looking into -or out from within- the road tunnel, I recommend using Poser lights to supplement the mesh lights. This is what it looks like using only the mesh lights: a P4-esque blurred texture.

In general, I recommend supplementing the mesh lighting with Poser lights in the immediate area of render interest, and letting the mesh lights carry the load everywhere else.

I gathered the files for this scene, and with the animated textures and the array of alternative skies, its 265MB. So Lothlorien will need to be broken up into a series of zips.