Help strategy for handling and designing large scenes

Philor

Hi all,
I have a rather large project for a collection of renders emulating the POV of a journalist/hero with a hidden cam (consider a cyber eye cam) in a dangerous place (here an island). I have no intention of animating the scenes (too much time consuming) but I will render every 10 or 30 seconds [not decided at this early stage] of the storyline. The plot is designed (roughly) and I will need a large 3D world of about 1 kilometre in x, 500 metres in z and 100 metres in y. Knowing that the base daz unit is 1 cm, it would be a HUGE scene.
Is it possible with a decent computer (not a Cray….) ? My experience with previous large sceneries is that they take a very long time to even load (not to mention render but in my case it is not the main problem) and I I have never really tried anything beyond a few hundred metres (probably less than 300).
I would like to get hints about the most effective strategy to achieve this project. Ideally I would create a gigantic light dome and put all my buildings and terrain (I have a hand made paper gridded map for reference). However I do not think it would be practical. My other option is to create numerous partial scenes (about the size of a floor grid which is 40*40 metres) corresponding to” real” world coordinates grid and then to merge them when needed. This way I can save many “world parts” creation processes but I have some doubts about the precise positioning of the merged subscenes, I would need to merge but also shift the references (as the 0 point is in fact 40 metres or a multiple of that away), not so easy actually….
I hope I was clear...
I suppose several artists in this forum have tried large scene projects and found a way to avoid the traps I guess. Any help/advice/comment would be highly appreciated. Thanks for reading and suggesting.
Philippe

Mattymanx

I have done several large scenes but none animated. Your approach of making smaller scenes and merging them is the same approach I use. i tend to split it up by characters as I find that the props and buildings tend to take less resources so I am willing to group more in regards to structures. What you may want to do is use Depth of Field when rendering so you can be both artistic and conserve resources at the same time as it will allow you to use lower res background characters (cause lets face it, no one can tell who is who when its all blurry)

Below are my two large scenes that I have done.

First one was finsihed in April of 2010 and the second was done earlier this year.

JPiat

Daz studio is not the right tool for large outdoor scene : No atmosphere generator, no volumetric cloud, no smart replication tool, no infinite plane for water.
Bryce or Carrara are better solutions in the daz universe.
Vue is probably the most appropriate soft but very hard to master.

On the other hand Daz studio manage the memory occupation nicely. The 3delight engine doesn't need a lot of memory if you set the render chunk to the minimum (8x8)

I create very large scene using daz for render and Bryce for terrain generation.
But the largest scene that I create is 800m x 800m

There is a max distance inside daz. 1km perhaps. A object too far from the camera will not be visible inside the viewport.

3D is the art of fake : Fake perspective,scale...
In my scene, if I change the position of the camera, there is a lot of void between props.

Philippe c'est un prénom français ça...
Julien.

Philor

Thank you for your helpful answers Mattymanx and Julien (jpiat).
Very nice work, lots of characters (heavy on RAM I guess) Matty. Yes, I know Depth of Field is my friend (and in fact I like rendering this way particularly as my project is based on a "subjective cam view"). My first intention was to build empty buildings and surroundings for large subscenes but I have some positioning problems as it is hard to work with void scenes and no floor grid for distant parts.
Julien, very interesting remark about the 1 km limitation, I did not know this important point but it nicely matches my project size.
If 800*800 m works for you it should be OK.
About water, I knew there would be problems with that... SYwaters seems good however. And there is this new easy environment "the rock" by Flipmode. I could buy it if useful (but it seems limited to close up scenes)
I have Bryce but I do not quite master it and I read several posts suggesting that it was not quite able to work with the latest versions of DS. You are right that is a more efficient tool to generate terrain but my first attempts were "unsatisfactory".
As a last note, oui Philippe c'est très français comme Julien et quand on voit les cédilles on devine d'où vient le clavier. Merci encore...
and Thanks for any other opinion.
Philippe