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DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
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© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Because I can't leave well enough alone, I rearranged that scene and added a whole bunch of new stuff to it, so now I'm back to endlessly troubleshooting what's making renders take so long. I did work out why the gas masks that were part of the original scene were making renders take so long: one of them had a duplicate Arnold parameters tag. I've already copied the texture files to the local disk, so that can't be the issue, so I may have condemned myself to hiding and unhiding individual elements until I find the culprit.
...I:like the gun store..Defintely has an SR feel to it.
Started experimenting more with Arnold's GPU rendering option. While it's faster than CPU rendering, you also have less control over sampling. The way sampling works, at least in Arnold, is that you have a number of AA (camera) samples, which are basically passes. On CPU, you can also set samples for individual elements like specular and transmission. The actual number of samples is the value you set squared, so 2 diffuse samples is actually 4, 3 is 9, etc. These individual samples are then multiplied by the AA samples squared. The samples I had set were 3 AA, 4 diffuse, 3 specular and 1 transmission, bring me to a total of 9 AA, 144 diffuse, 81 specular and 9 transmission. GPU rendering, on the other hand, only uses AA samples, meaning that I would need 12 AA samples to reach the equivalent settings for diffuse, which is typically the noisiest element. Here's what all of that looks like:
3 samples: 6:36
4 samples: 8:00
5 samples: 9:51
6 samples: 11:56
7 samples: 14:22
8 samples: 17:22
9 samples: 20:29
10 samples: 24:01
11 samples: 28:10
So we can see that increasing AA samples increases render times in a slightly more than linear fashion. There are also diminishing returns as far as noise reduction past about 7 samples. For comparison, here is the same scene rendered on the CPU using the samples I cited earlier, rendered in 27:07:
It's cleaner than even the 11-sample render above which took longer, but you have to zoom in to see the benefits, so I need to stop being myself and admit that the GPU renders are an acceptable level of clean.
Thank you! I also have a magic shop in mind, so hopefully it can come together quicker with all the lessons I've learned from this.
And here's what's been just off-camera this whole time:
Of course I'm thinking about fleshing it out some more, but God, haven't I suffered enough for this scene?
Now that I've allowed myself to move on from the gun store, I've started building out the rest of the housing block. So far I haven't felt the need to modify the auto repair shop beyond the stock KB3D set, but it did require some intensive surgery to get it to fit inside the building. I'm replacing the indistinct, weathered paper signage attached to the building with neon signs. The Dutch angle is only to obscure the fact that the housing block is currently the only thing in the scene, so all you're missing outside the bounds of the frame is the HDRI showing through the lack of a ground.
Cyberpunk Housing Block
Still in progress, but I'm learning a lot about how to speed up renders, mainly by learning the settings that make Arnold's GPU rendering actually usable. This scene rendered in 4K faster than a lot of my HD renders of the gun store were rendering, and I could also render the gun store a lot faster now than I had been. Need to make signs for the gun store, garage and whatever other businesses end up being on the ground floor.
NM I realised my idea not as simple as I thought
I'm still interested in hearing it.
OMG I don't think I am even in the right thread
Now I'm even more interested.
More or less finished with all the signs. There are still a bunch of empty signs frames, but I might leave them papered over as a sign of dilapidation. I modeled the sidewalk, and it's probably the first thing I've modeled like an actual modeler would, with scrupulous attention to edge loops so I can keep the poly count low. I'm using procedurally-generated shaders that I made myself with an assortment of noise nodes, but I might try some of the pre-made textures, despite the possibility of visible tiling.
I've also made the discovery that TerraLuna's HDRIs are INSANELY bright. Usually when I'm using an HDRI, I have to set the exposure somewhere between 1 and 3; with this HDRI, I had to lower exposure to -6 just to prevent the scene from being washed out in white.
It won't be difficult for someone to figure out which of the signs I made myself. At least I can spin some in-universe explanation about how the crappy signs are the ones made by local businesses or whomever they hired on the cyberpunk version of Fiverr, whereas all the signs that actually look good are ads for megacorporations.
Still a few openings in the main building to fill out, and time for an important decision: do I bother with filling out all the empty windows, or force myself to accept that it doesn't really matter?
Cyberpunk Housing Block v2
Doot de doo
Coool!
Thanks!
I procedurally generated some road lines and have been dialing the sidewalk texture in a bit more. I'm not sure why I'm not getting more DoF, because even with the camera at f/0.8 I'm only getting a little bit of blur, and later than I should based on where the camera is focusing.
very dystopian
Thank you!
I think I just needed to temper my expectations about what I could do with DoF, because what I was expecting out of the previous scene probably wasn't physically possible. I tried extending the focal length of the camera, and when that wasn't getting what I wanted, I moved the camera closer to the subject (and added C4D's figure primitive as a subject). The blur still seems a little weak for f/1.2, but I'm still relatively far away from the subject. On the other hand, I think this is the first time I've ever gotten bokeh out of a render, so at least I'm doing something right. I'll probably never get the sidewalk texture to look quite the way I want it, but I'm too Scottish to just give up and use a pre-made texture, at least not yet. Seeing the sidewalk this close up also reminded me that I need to cover it with garbage.
No effort put into posing the figure or even properly framing it, just wanted to experiment more with DoF.
This is starting to look more like it.
With a human for scale, I now see that the leaflets littering the ground are far too big.
The sign's a work in progress, and I need to grunge up the interior and make it more techy.
And a quick render of the proprietor of that establishment while I continue hacking it into my vision.
Not final, but getting there. My idea was that it should look like a cross between an operating room and a machine shop.
Following Your Progress With Great Interest:D
Especially love the roughness on the wall tilles;) And the harsh lighting... and the...
Thanks! I am a little conflicted, because I like the harsh lighting, and especially given that the proprietor has two cyber eyes, I could make the case that the light is really only for the benefit of customers, but on the other hand, there are some details that I don't want to get lost in the lighting, like the bloody power tools on the metal cart. As for the roughness, one of C4D's best features is its noise generators. That's a single noise node, mixed with the pre-made roughness map, and then mixed with the pre-made diffuse map at a lower exposure with a dark brown color. I might do another noise node for sparse blood splatters, but that might be overdoing it.
Heh, I'll leave the conflict solving to you, but definitely enjoy the ride! That's an interesting approach you're describing there, tks for that!
Found a comfortable compromise on the lighting, and am still in the process of getting the room all set up.
I also converted the proprietor (whom I've provisionally named Singh) to Arnold, and converted Vintage Male Hair to curves using an asset I downloaded for Houdini, but for some reason that same asset failed to convert Adeeb's eyebrows. After a lot of experimentation that went nowhere, I just drew guides on his brow and groomed them a bit. Originally his eyes were green, but given that I've called him Singh, which is a Punjabi name that is associated with Sikhism, I decided to look up some color significance in Sikh culture. Royal blue is associated with trustworthiness and reliability, which seemed like a good fit. Gold has great significance across the various Indian cultures as well.
Another angle, with a light filter on the hanging light to give it more decay.