Dammit! I know your handle but I never seem to miss an opportunity to typo it! Very sorry about that!
Thanks for the link to TobiasRichter's tutorial. I thought'd I'd seen them all but this is the first time I've seen this one. I'll see what I can do to adapt these tips to the project. My skill at unwrapping is still somewhere around level 0 so this will be an interesting challenge!
I'm reasonably certain that I've gone WAY overboard on this one. Credit is due to Paramount, I cribbed the UFP logo and the hall of Enterprises photos from a number of HD screencaps for TMP. I'm pleased with how you can just make out the OV-101 landing in the center.
I don't think I have the scale 100% accurate but I am equally certain that the rec deck as seen on TMP is not to scale either
Since this is literally window dressing I'm going to call it here. I can use this as bones for a full-scale model if I decide to do any interior shots of this part of the ship. In the meantime 95% of this will be invisible from the exterior so it's more practice than practical.
McC,
Sorry again for my perpetual abuse of your handle.
Thanks for your assistance with the memory usage issue. I've successfully compressed four layers of details into a single stencil by coloring each type of stencil in R, G, B, or Bk (for alpha mask) and sequencing them with alpha last. The output is identical to the original but much lighter for memory footprint. I think I can compress even more information into a stencil layer by using color ramps to emphasize different shades of colors but I really hope that won't be necessary
I spent the weekend merging materials for the saucer and have cut memory usage by 2/3 so far. It'll probably take me another week to work my way through the remaining parts but my laptop is so much happier for the reduced load!
It looks great. It always amazes me when people go to this much detail on something that's not really going to be seen. From any distance, it will just look like colored blobs. :shiner:
I'm reasonably certain that I've gone WAY overboard on this one. Credit is due to Paramount, I cribbed the UFP logo and the hall of Enterprises photos from a number of HD screencaps for TMP. I'm pleased with how you can just make out the OV-101 landing in the center.
Way overboard is the best board :shiner:
McC,
Sorry again for my perpetual abuse of your handle.
Not at all. You are far from the first and are surely not the last!
I've actually been transitioning out of using it for a while now, precisely because there are so many ways to get it "wrong." ("McG" is a common one, but people also often think it's supposed to be pronounced "Em Cee Cee" when it's, in fact, "Mick-See" and is a truncation of my last name.) I could probably poke the mods to have it changed here, but just haven't gotten around to it (nor have I firmly decided what I'd want a new one to be!)
Thanks for your assistance with the memory usage issue. I've successfully compressed four layers of details into a single stencil by coloring each type of stencil in R, G, B, or Bk (for alpha mask) and sequencing them with alpha last. The output is identical to the original but much lighter for memory footprint. I think I can compress even more information into a stencil layer by using color ramps to emphasize different shades of colors but I really hope that won't be necessary
I spent the weekend merging materials for the saucer and have cut memory usage by 2/3 so far. It'll probably take me another week to work my way through the remaining parts but my laptop is so much happier for the reduced load!
Like many of you, I'm still coming to grips that I live in a world with one fewer cast from the original series. I'm planning on something special to mark the passing of Leonard Nimoy but it's going to take some some time to get it completed. In the meantime, an update.
I've been working on some tweaks to the rec deck. Regrettably I was working in an isolated layer and had lost track of the undercut in the saucer. There was a lot of intersection so it will have to be dramatically redesigned. I'm about 40% through it but I've put that on hold for the moment.
I've quickly run through the needed build-up of interior decks for the lighting. It's rough at the moment but I intend to flesh this out once my current project is completed.
Here's the current state of the model.
Render time was 22 minutes at 50 samples.
Even with the partial texture optimization I've completed, it really revs my cooling fans to their limits. I'm waiting on the nVidia press event on 3/3 before I pull the trigger on a new video card. I'd hate to grab a 'new' one just as it became obsolete...
Like many of you, I'm still coming to grips that I live in a world with one fewer cast from the original series.
No offense to the surviving cast, but all of my favorites from the show are dead now. First, Deforest Kelley, then James Doohan and now Leonard Nimoy. Bones, Scotty and Spock are my favorites. And, of course, there was the sad passing of Majel Barrett-Roddenberry in 2008. However, while I liked her fine as Christine Chapel, my favorite character of hers will always be Lwaxana Troi.
I agree, fantastic render. Though, if you ever animate this beast, it's going to take you ages.
You aren't joking! I'm working on a photon torpedo effect using compositing. The addition of yet another emission object introduced just enough grain that I had to bump up my samples again. Unless I find other ways to optimize my render, my tribute project is going to take nearly two months rendering time on my primary rig! And that's assuming I get it all right on the first pass (and how likely is that, really?).
I'm looking at render farm services. The for-pay ones will bankrupt me before I'm half way done and the memory utilization is too great for the free services. Time to get back to chiseling away at my textures.
Last night, while I poured over blog posts and wikis documenting tricks for reducing noise (and thereby the need for increased samples), my primary churned and chirped, whirled and wheezed it's way through another monster render.
This morning I awoke to this...
I think I'm getting the hang of the compositor
The stars are procedural and not quite up to snuff yet. Regrettably, Blender opted to strip out it's built-in starfield background generator so it will be procedural tricks or ultra-high resolution NASA/ESA photos. A little more tweaking and I think I will be happy with this solution.
The Photorp is my pride and joy at the moment. I haven't done any post-production tweaking of source files for a render in a long time and I am VERY impressed with the features I am seeing in Blender. Now if only I could find concise instruction on each little Swiss army knife node in the compositor pallet.
You aren't joking! I'm working on a photon torpedo effect using compositing. The addition of yet another emission object introduced just enough grain that I had to bump up my samples again. Unless I find other ways to optimize my render, my tribute project is going to take nearly two months rendering time on my primary rig! And that's assuming I get it all right on the first pass (and how likely is that, really?).
I'm looking at render farm services. The for-pay ones will bankrupt me before I'm half way done and the memory utilization is too great for the free services. Time to get back to chiseling away at my textures.
Here's one option, as far as farms go. It's a cheaper alternative:
He shows how to do it with desktop machines, and how to network them in Windows, OSX and Linux, so you should be covered no matter what you're running.
Thanks!
I managed to pull this off with a single emission source and some creative compositor nodes. I think it will really shine when I animate it (should the render complete before the next ice age).
Thanks for the Ars link. I'd love to build out my own render farm but right now 95% of my free funds are devoted towards a housing purchase. I can almost guarantee that once a permanent house has been acquired, there will be a server room devoted to production
As an added bonus, Blender has officially announced it's own, native network render framework. This should dramatically simplify the process. At least once it gets beyond the alpha stage, that is!
I didn't know Blender didn't already have its own network framework. Though, if they want people to seriously consider them as an alternative to Lightwave, Maya and Max for commercial endeavors, it's definitely a good idea to add that.
I didn't know Blender didn't already have its own network framework. Though, if they want people to seriously consider them as an alternative to Lightwave, Maya and Max for commercial endeavors, it's definitely a good idea to add that.
I agree wholeheartedly! I think that the unbelievably scriptable nature of Blender has resulted in the majority of the users with bulk rendering needs to simply script their own solution for handling network renders. Now that Blender foundation has scaled up their projects, they've decided to bake one into the core platform. It should eventually be nice, though right now it's barely a prototype.
Long time no post! Fortunately the project is still alive and kicking.
I've been hard at work fighting fireflies and optimizing textures. As I felt I was wrapping up my model I realized that I was using over 6 Gig of memory thanks to unoptimized geometry and poorly constructed shaders. A month of spare time work has got that down to 2.03 Gig so my renders are a lot smoother.
My latest challenge has been fireflies. Anywhere I have a small emissive mesh, there are almost assured to be fireflies. Optimizing the shaders only helped so much with this so my next step was to crank up the samples. This has had a painful impact on render time but the results are pleasing. I'm debating pulling out the problematic emission sources and throwing in a small cone light source in its place. See the underside of the saucer for an example of what I'm talking about.
On the plus side, my wife and I recently decided to spring for new laptops. Since this was coming from a shared budget and not my personal workstation upgrade fund, we both went a little overboard and got the newest ASUS ROG laptops to replace our 5-year-old ROGs. Quite a nice upgrade!
Yeah, those fireflies are ugly, they ruin the renders of a beautiful mesh. Switching to lights may work, though I thought Cycles didn't handle regular lights very well. At least, that's what that one tutorial told me when I tried Blender again a few months back. I'm sure you people who are more versed in the software know tricks around that.
On the plus side, my wife and I recently decided to spring for new laptops. Since this was coming from a shared budget and not my personal workstation upgrade fund, we both went a little overboard and got the newest ASUS ROG laptops to replace our 5-year-old ROGs. Quite a nice upgrade!
Sweet. The ROG line is some badass stuff for gaming, which means it will work well for CGI. ASUS is a good company but, from what I hear, you never want to deal with their customer service, or lack thereof. Of course, that's never stopped me from buying their stuff, with which I've never had a major problem. My desktop graphics card is nearly 5 years old and still going, it's an ASUS.
That looks fantastic, Gestalt! Really clean lines and the UVs look marvelous.
What sort of sampling count are you using in these? I generally find I need ~1000 to get rid of most fireflies, sometimes as high as ~2000. I do not much like the impact this has on render times, but c'est la vie.
I was going to list a bunch of suggestions, but Vortex5972 beat me to it by linking to my own tutorial on the matter.
Unrelated to all of that, there seems to be something very...flat? about either the surface or the lighting at this juncture. It may just have to do with the color/light depth (i.e. whether or not you're using a linear workflow and HDRI color grading on the final renders or not), though I suspect there may be more to it than just that. Hard to quite pin down.
And just to throw my own hat into the ring, my wife and I also bought ROG laptops a while back and couldn't be happier.
And thank you Vortex5972 and McC for the link to fantastic breakdown of Cycles recommendations. The recommendations have been a real help in tuning my render settings.
McC,
You are quite right, it is very flat at the moment. I think I need to punch up the lighting a bit and to do some additional tweaks to the shaders.
Included is my largest rendering yet of the ship. I've been tinkering with clamp values. They're critical to getting rid of fireflies but they definitely suck the life out of the image. It's a bit over illuminated in this shot but it does a good job showing off the texturing. I'm at 2400 samples right now, though the emission lights on the neck are still looking a bit 'chalky' in my test renders so I will probably have to turn that up.
She renders perfectly without clamp so long as I don't use emission on the interior lights. That's good news if I ever render her powered down but a definite challenge while she's under power.
I'm experimenting with adding lights and modifying the existing lights in an attempt to bring a bit more life to the shot. It's a single frame of a rather lengthy animation. Hopefully the lighting holds up once the camera starts moving.
I feel that I'm getting very close to what I want with the latest render (no compositor edits yet). I've punched up the lighting and I feel it's got much more 'life' to it now.
As a static image I think that there is still more work to be done on the brightness and saturation. As a frame in an animation, however, I am fairly happy with this shot.
Now that I have a compositor node formula that addresses my chalky emissions, I think she just might be ready to start exploring strange, new worlds.
Posts
Thanks for the link to TobiasRichter's tutorial. I thought'd I'd seen them all but this is the first time I've seen this one. I'll see what I can do to adapt these tips to the project. My skill at unwrapping is still somewhere around level 0 so this will be an interesting challenge!
I'm reasonably certain that I've gone WAY overboard on this one. Credit is due to Paramount, I cribbed the UFP logo and the hall of Enterprises photos from a number of HD screencaps for TMP. I'm pleased with how you can just make out the OV-101 landing in the center.
I don't think I have the scale 100% accurate but I am equally certain that the rec deck as seen on TMP is not to scale either
Since this is literally window dressing I'm going to call it here. I can use this as bones for a full-scale model if I decide to do any interior shots of this part of the ship. In the meantime 95% of this will be invisible from the exterior so it's more practice than practical.
McC,
Sorry again for my perpetual abuse of your handle.
Thanks for your assistance with the memory usage issue. I've successfully compressed four layers of details into a single stencil by coloring each type of stencil in R, G, B, or Bk (for alpha mask) and sequencing them with alpha last. The output is identical to the original but much lighter for memory footprint. I think I can compress even more information into a stencil layer by using color ramps to emphasize different shades of colors but I really hope that won't be necessary
I spent the weekend merging materials for the saucer and have cut memory usage by 2/3 so far. It'll probably take me another week to work my way through the remaining parts but my laptop is so much happier for the reduced load!
Way overboard is the best board :shiner:
Not at all.
I've actually been transitioning out of using it for a while now, precisely because there are so many ways to get it "wrong." ("McG" is a common one, but people also often think it's supposed to be pronounced "Em Cee Cee" when it's, in fact, "Mick-See" and is a truncation of my last name.) I could probably poke the mods to have it changed here, but just haven't gotten around to it (nor have I firmly decided what I'd want a new one to be!)
That's outstanding! Way to go!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
I've been working on some tweaks to the rec deck. Regrettably I was working in an isolated layer and had lost track of the undercut in the saucer. There was a lot of intersection so it will have to be dramatically redesigned. I'm about 40% through it but I've put that on hold for the moment.
I've quickly run through the needed build-up of interior decks for the lighting. It's rough at the moment but I intend to flesh this out once my current project is completed.
Here's the current state of the model.
Render time was 22 minutes at 50 samples.
Even with the partial texture optimization I've completed, it really revs my cooling fans to their limits. I'm waiting on the nVidia press event on 3/3 before I pull the trigger on a new video card. I'd hate to grab a 'new' one just as it became obsolete...
No offense to the surviving cast, but all of my favorites from the show are dead now. First, Deforest Kelley, then James Doohan and now Leonard Nimoy. Bones, Scotty and Spock are my favorites. And, of course, there was the sad passing of Majel Barrett-Roddenberry in 2008. However, while I liked her fine as Christine Chapel, my favorite character of hers will always be Lwaxana Troi.
You aren't joking! I'm working on a photon torpedo effect using compositing. The addition of yet another emission object introduced just enough grain that I had to bump up my samples again. Unless I find other ways to optimize my render, my tribute project is going to take nearly two months rendering time on my primary rig! And that's assuming I get it all right on the first pass (and how likely is that, really?).
I'm looking at render farm services. The for-pay ones will bankrupt me before I'm half way done and the memory utilization is too great for the free services. Time to get back to chiseling away at my textures.
This morning I awoke to this...
I think I'm getting the hang of the compositor
The stars are procedural and not quite up to snuff yet. Regrettably, Blender opted to strip out it's built-in starfield background generator so it will be procedural tricks or ultra-high resolution NASA/ESA photos. A little more tweaking and I think I will be happy with this solution.
The Photorp is my pride and joy at the moment. I haven't done any post-production tweaking of source files for a render in a long time and I am VERY impressed with the features I am seeing in Blender. Now if only I could find concise instruction on each little Swiss army knife node in the compositor pallet.
There are also times larger pictures?
Greetings
trekki
I recently learned how to make those in Lightwave using 5 lights with different flare settings.
Here's one option, as far as farms go. It's a cheaper alternative:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/how-to-network-lots-of-dumb-computing-muscle-in-a-fast-efficient-render-farm/
He shows how to do it with desktop machines, and how to network them in Windows, OSX and Linux, so you should be covered no matter what you're running.
I managed to pull this off with a single emission source and some creative compositor nodes. I think it will really shine when I animate it (should the render complete before the next ice age).
Thanks for the Ars link. I'd love to build out my own render farm but right now 95% of my free funds are devoted towards a housing purchase. I can almost guarantee that once a permanent house has been acquired, there will be a server room devoted to production
As an added bonus, Blender has officially announced it's own, native network render framework. This should dramatically simplify the process. At least once it gets beyond the alpha stage, that is!
I agree wholeheartedly! I think that the unbelievably scriptable nature of Blender has resulted in the majority of the users with bulk rendering needs to simply script their own solution for handling network renders. Now that Blender foundation has scaled up their projects, they've decided to bake one into the core platform. It should eventually be nice, though right now it's barely a prototype.
I've been hard at work fighting fireflies and optimizing textures. As I felt I was wrapping up my model I realized that I was using over 6 Gig of memory thanks to unoptimized geometry and poorly constructed shaders. A month of spare time work has got that down to 2.03 Gig so my renders are a lot smoother.
My latest challenge has been fireflies. Anywhere I have a small emissive mesh, there are almost assured to be fireflies. Optimizing the shaders only helped so much with this so my next step was to crank up the samples. This has had a painful impact on render time but the results are pleasing. I'm debating pulling out the problematic emission sources and throwing in a small cone light source in its place. See the underside of the saucer for an example of what I'm talking about.
On the plus side, my wife and I recently decided to spring for new laptops. Since this was coming from a shared budget and not my personal workstation upgrade fund, we both went a little overboard and got the newest ASUS ROG laptops to replace our 5-year-old ROGs. Quite a nice upgrade!
Sweet. The ROG line is some badass stuff for gaming, which means it will work well for CGI. ASUS is a good company but, from what I hear, you never want to deal with their customer service, or lack thereof. Of course, that's never stopped me from buying their stuff, with which I've never had a major problem. My desktop graphics card is nearly 5 years old and still going, it's an ASUS.
http://www.mcc3d.com/cg/blender_tutorial/t_cycles.php
The second image should have what you need.
That looks fantastic, Gestalt! Really clean lines and the UVs look marvelous.
What sort of sampling count are you using in these? I generally find I need ~1000 to get rid of most fireflies, sometimes as high as ~2000. I do not much like the impact this has on render times, but c'est la vie.
I was going to list a bunch of suggestions, but Vortex5972 beat me to it by linking to my own tutorial on the matter.
Unrelated to all of that, there seems to be something very...flat? about either the surface or the lighting at this juncture. It may just have to do with the color/light depth (i.e. whether or not you're using a linear workflow and HDRI color grading on the final renders or not), though I suspect there may be more to it than just that. Hard to quite pin down.
And just to throw my own hat into the ring, my wife and I also bought ROG laptops a while back and couldn't be happier.
Anyway, delighted to see your progress!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
And thank you Vortex5972 and McC for the link to fantastic breakdown of Cycles recommendations. The recommendations have been a real help in tuning my render settings.
McC,
You are quite right, it is very flat at the moment. I think I need to punch up the lighting a bit and to do some additional tweaks to the shaders.
Included is my largest rendering yet of the ship. I've been tinkering with clamp values. They're critical to getting rid of fireflies but they definitely suck the life out of the image. It's a bit over illuminated in this shot but it does a good job showing off the texturing. I'm at 2400 samples right now, though the emission lights on the neck are still looking a bit 'chalky' in my test renders so I will probably have to turn that up.
She renders perfectly without clamp so long as I don't use emission on the interior lights. That's good news if I ever render her powered down but a definite challenge while she's under power.
For a larger view click here
I'm experimenting with adding lights and modifying the existing lights in an attempt to bring a bit more life to the shot. It's a single frame of a rather lengthy animation. Hopefully the lighting holds up once the camera starts moving.
I have indeed! I've been looking for some good tutorials on breaking renders down into individual passes. Any suggestions?
I'm contemplating using bilateral blur nodes in the compositor as demonstrated by Bartek Skorupa in a CGCookie.
http://cgcookie.com/blender/2012/12/10/compositing-cycles-render-passes-blender/
I might have some ideas on multi-pass rendering
I've tweaked that setup a bit here and there, but it's still the foundation of my rendering setup.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Now that I have a compositor node formula that addresses my chalky emissions, I think she just might be ready to start exploring strange, new worlds.
Thoughts?
Full resolution visible here.
Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 12GB
1TB NVMe SSD, 2 x 1GB SATA SSD, 4TB external HDD
32 GB RAM
Windows 11 Pro