I didn't want to tie up Snowy's thread with my stuff, so I figured I'd best post my stuff here.

Data, as per your request, here's that art piece, re-rendered to 1920x1080 for you.


Midnight Oil

(I think it looks better in the larger size, myself)

Dave I edited your post as the link was pointing to the 'edit' picture page.

Looks great in the larger size 

Oh yes! that looks much nicer in 1080, it's a great addition to the HD wallpaper. 

@Freddy: Thanks! It's nice to know someone's got my back.

@Data: I'm glad you like it, Sir. There are two more in the series that I'm planning on re-rendering at 1920x1080, as well. I'll probably do "The Study", which shows a lot more detail of the room, today. the last one, "Evening Contemplation", I'll probably do come Wednesday or so.

Once you've posted the pic you can link direct to the thumb of that pic.

It's a bit weird at first but if you edit your post you'll see what I've done.

If you save the thumb is says .jpg but the link has to be .jpeg

Yeah come on Dave get it right lol

Actually that is quite handy to know Snowy, even I wondered how you did that

I should have thought of it myself.

The render for the next one is taking far longer than I had hoped for, even with three of the six other network computers sharing the load. A small section (150x260 pixels in size), at the lowest/fastest rendering settings took an hour and a half. The full render may take two or more days (there's a LOT of detail in this one).

UPDATE:

The good news is that the next image in the series will be fantastic!
The bad news is that it's been rendering now for 20 hours straight, got to only 8%, and I've discovered a flaw that needs to be addressed, which means starting the render from scratch yet again. Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed.

I assume you're using Bryce to render the frames. I have no experience with this software but it seems to be taking a long time to render. i.e. too long.

From my experience with MAX, shadows and recursive reflections were the main things that upped the time to render. I'll post an old pic of my synth and computer soon; I'm sure this only took 1-2 hours on a far inferior PC than what I now have. It has a huge polly count but only 1 reflection (not recursive).

I've always found MAX a little hard to model in (ok for primitives) and tended to use Solid Works to build the 3D models then import into MAX (.stl files). Solid Works is/was an excellent piece of software.
Data has some experience with primitives modeling in second life. Very similar to how other software does it.

Everything in this scene was modelled on real things I, or my friends, owned. With the exception of the room itself. The synths are red instead of black 'cos it looked better.

Every key on the synths is seperate and could be animated though I never did. Even the screens on the synths have the correct displays and colours. The front of the PC has far more detail than you'll ever need.

Very nice, Snowy! I'm afraid that my musical talents only extend to playing one instrument: The Radio. I love music, and love to sing, but have no talent at all in that direction.

Quote from: Snowcrash on June 22, 2011, 17:48:13 PM
I assume you're using Bryce to render the frames. I have no experience with this software but it seems to be taking a long time to render. i.e. too long.

I have to agree with this. Usually it doesn't take this long to render even complex scenes, and once the render is complete I'll look into the reason it's taking so long (the render is only 60% complete right now). I'm loathe, though, to stop the render and have to re-start it again. The image it's producing is pretty good, even though it's on the lowest detail settings. That's the price I pay to have it render as a "volumetric world".

Ahh, that makes sense. Volumetric kills render times as well.

I'm amazed that graphics cards can do it on the fly so well. I assume they use some sort of coding short cut. Or it could be raw power.

Most software is processor intensive only and doesn't use the graphics processing of a PC. Which seems a little short sighted, seeing as your graphics card can do some things far faster. Like 10 to 100 times faster.

I think it would be great if companies like Daz3D would team up with major graphics card manufacturers, such as ATI or nVidia (preferably both) to use the power of the graphics adaptor in their rendering process, since it's exactly the type of thing that display adapters are made for. That way, instead of measuring render times in hours (or days), we would see renders take minutes (or maybe even seconds). Wouldn't THAT be cool?

[side-note]
I've stopped the render, and removed the volumetric flag, and it's off and running again. Spot rendering is indicating much faster progress, but the visual results are somewhat disappointing. I'm going to have to fiddle with it some more to strike a balance.

Well, here's yet another reason why the render is taking so long; The poly count for the scene is 20,193,032 (yes, that's twenty MILLION polygons! ) - And Bryce doesn't have the option to cull polygons that aren't visible, so even the back-side of the wall is rendered, and the surfaces behind that wall, as well. I should probably see if I can trim that down a bit.