Thanks a lot for your positive feedback, guys!
I think Mayo's issue is more related to manipulating his awesomely big and beautiful model within blender than
how long it takes him to render it. Running a remote virtual machine from your pc to his laptop might help but so could
running blender from a lightweight linux distro. But I really dont know what im talking about.
I really just wanted to say that field screen looks freakin beautiful
At this point, I actually have both issues. As I manipulate my scene, I can work my way around by hiding the flower layers, and show it only for renders. Still, it's getting pretty slow. Then, yesterday I went for a full render with all the flower fields, it took about 1 hour to render. When I'm to including water transparencies and reflections, and then the waterfalls, it's gonna take time...
well damn.. Alright i got $50 to donate for a new vid card, Who's with me?!
Well, that's what I got for having purchased a laptop to browse the web and use MS office
I plan on investing for a new desktop PC sometime next year though.
it's looking really good man, but i'm curious as to why you're going with tesselation + displacement, over low poly + bump map? you could recieve much the same result as you have now.
to be clear, not questioning your results, just your method =]
I actually used a combination of both. At first I wanted to do everything with displacement, but my laptop could not. So, I went for using displacements for large scale deformations, and use bumpmaps for small scale details. Bumpmap details are actually more apparent on this picture. I did not discard the large scale displacements, because I believe they are essential for 2 aspects:
- without the large scale displacements, the vertical ridges are too... "vertical". I needed some irregularities on those (check the side of the rock cylinders in high res, for instance). The displacements on the vertical ridges (and also on the back cliff) are also very important for the way the rocks cast shadows on themselves. Bumpmaps cannot do those things.
- It turned out that, in the completely shaded areas of the cliffs, my bumpmaps almost did not show. Without displacements, the shaded areas of the cliffs look very flat, and compared to the areas exposed to light, it was just looking really off. In a way, the displacements were almost the only thing that make the cliff look bumpy when it's completely shaded.
I think that relying on bumpmaps only could have worked at lower resolution, but as we go for pretty high-res, we enter a level of details where the displacements are necessary. I could say I learned that during my previous scene (at first I modelled a corrugated metal sheet with bumpmaps, but I considerably improved my results when I meshed the corrugations instead).