Particle City

empty rooms

... and after all the oil was gulfed, and all the cars, traffic lights and street signs gone, and the food and the people too, there was still enough coal left for twenty more years of nightly illuminations of empty cities ...

citylights4.jpg
 
archie and the curse of the irradiance artifacts

epic failure.

now that i wanted to show off my citylights material with moving floors/ceilings again the evil biased cheetah render algorithm got me.
the first version with window and cloudplane light showed unbearable flickering,
so i added an ambient light which killed the flicker and also all shadows, i had to redo the pavement mat with artificial gap shadows in diffuse, now everything looked like plastic toys.
so i did a compromise version with less ambient and a *little* noise too keep the entrances' shadows dependent from the windows, but it's still awkward.
i chose 2000 radiosity samples for rendering 510 frames in 5 days, 10 000 samples may have been sufficient but i won't wait one month for a 20s animation.
i think i'll give up on cheetah rendering until we have some unbiased improvement.
next thing was i couldn't convert in quicktime.
the png files show all the detail (and flicker) put play jerky on my mac.
normally i convert to max size jpegs which play smoothly, but on this dark scene i got compression color gradient artifacts on the clouds and the asphalt, ruining the directional marks texture.
so i'm sorry for not being able to provide somthing better than this crappy mp4.
i'm at the end of my means,

- archie

View attachment citylights6+.jas.zip
 
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Hi,
I've download your scene and you are right Cheetah3D has indeed quite some problems with it. There is quite some room for enhancements for me to do. But also an unbaised rendered will take quite some time to converge for all these refractive materials and small bright windows.

But you will be lucky to hear that I'm currently working on adding more video codecs to Cheetah3D. Things look quite good for 5.6 so far.

Bye,
Martin
 
Martin said:
Hi,
I've download your scene and you are right Cheetah3D has indeed quite some problems with it. There is quite some room for enhancements for me to do. But also an unbaised rendered will take quite some time to converge for all these refractive materials and small bright windows.

But you will be lucky to hear that I'm currently working on adding more video codecs to Cheetah3D. Things look quite good for 5.6 so far.

Bye,
Martin
Click to expand...

thanks martin !

reflective materials: indeed when i render without the fresnel setting the noise disappears !
sadly in this scene the reflections are absolutely vital :frown:
theoretically i could do another pass without ambient and then one without fresnel and blend them together but this would mean another week-long rendering...

- archie
 
wip

... and currently i'm at daylight city procedurals, though it's not finished the first renders look promising.
the particle system messes up the procedural mat origin, until this gets fixed i cannot go for sloped terrains etc.
i used meshman's chainmail from the pig-thread along with my own materials, all on simple cubes with more sophisticated architecture yet missing.

- archie

View attachment tempmat6.jas.zip

Untitled-1.jpg
 
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That looks great Archie. Like the way you used my Gucci pig mat to turn that building into something like the one in Birmingham (is it where the bullring was/is?).
By the way, your gallery is looking fantastic. Are those all C3D renders. Some look suspiciously like terragen2 and I wondered about things like the espresso render? If that is done in C3D I'd love to see the scene file.

cheers

Daryl
 
(hi rez in gallery now)

hi daryl, thank you for your kind words.

indeed it's mostly cheetah (like the espresso cups) and some vue 7 renders.
basically i bought cheetah to do my own models for vue, only it turned out that the fantastic gui of cheetah actually allowed me to achieve something, whereas in vue i'm still kinda stuck, fuddling with the presets and pissed at their upgrade ways, just i found i cannot render hd animations without a new upgrade or module (i rendered the max 768x576 and got evil flickering procedurals, so i won't probably invest further).
and yes, your chainmail mat is architecturally valuable though i don't know the building you are talking about.
recently i have many problems with cheetah rendering, in this one the particles mess up the mat origin, the nightscene was noisy etc.
now i'm waiting for luxrender 7 , hoping hiroto may provide a new exporter...

cheers,
archie
 
thanks guys !
after the demo shown to the financing committee revealed serious material flaws the architect got fired and the banks added they couldn't find someone wanting to take a mortgage, so the project was cancelled and everyone took their jets for some golf on the bahamas...

- archie
 
archie said:
thanks guys !
after the demo shown to the financing committee revealed serious material flaws the architect got fired and the banks added they couldn't find someone wanting to take a mortgage, so the project was cancelled and everyone took their jets for some golf on the bahamas...

- archie
Click to expand...

Very cool, Archie. :icon_thumbup: And how many weeks did it take to render?
 
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