I’ve been playing with volumetric lights recently and decided to use them here. I used that, Global Illumination, Caustics, Final Gather, DOF, photographic exposure, contour shaders and a few other tricks to make a pretty awesome looking scene.
This single 1080p frame took 4 hours and 7 minutes to render on my Intel i7 3.7 GHz (overclocked) workstation using the FG “High quality” preset with 200,000 GI photons. Most of the time was spent rendering the field skirt and the large balls, they are particularly complex due to the multiple surfaces and caustics calculations.
Anyway I’m just going to put this out there, no licensing - go nuts, but if you can credit is always nice. Comments welcome.
EDIT: Someone caught some issues with the large balls having black spots on them, I know what happened and have uploaded a patched render. Refresh if you still see black spots. Sorry about that!
Great render Cody, as per usual. That’d be cool if you got another high-res render of the field at a height of one of the hanging bars looking down at the field. It would be a close up shot of the field but still have the whole field in the picture. Post it on this thread if you do it!
I’m working on getting this to a reasonable level without cutting too many corners. One neat thing you can do is save the FG points to a file and reuse the data (which is the longest part of the calculation) so long as nothing but the camera moves. So that trick only works for the flythrough shots. But hey that’s something.
Another thing you can do is throw more power at the problem, I have a dual-i7 machine sitting next to my bed that is waiting for a second CPU cooler to arrive before I can use it. Once I have that node online I can jump to a whopping 17 ish frames a day.
Anyway the thing that is taking the longest is computing the FG points, which to the best of my understanding is a complicated raytrace operation. I kind of think that the 1.4 million polys in this scene are the culprit here. While Round Up had more, they were often out of view and thus not really a concern whereas here everything is pretty much in view.
I’m going to play around with this and see if less geometry make it go faster or not, should be easy - just hide everything but the floor and see what happens.
Yeah but now you have to begin to factor in the cost of power consumption and the cost of rewiring your house, as well as figuring out how to cluster that many computers together.
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