Blender Underground

Hey gang,
This is my first "real" finished product; Go easy This took me about 7 hours to render fully on my Core i7 with 12Gb ram. I tried to see if I could crank up all of the settings and this is the result. I've titled it, "Trouble." All of the objects, graphics, and decals are my original works aside from the Weyland Yutani logo. Per usual, (constructive) comments always welcome!

Enjoy!

It's very good. I can see that you have done some good modelling there, lots of detail there too and you have flouros that actually look like flouros, good stuff !
Best of all, it is a complete scene.
I am surprised it took that long to render, even with 12 Gb of RAM etc. ( I'm envious btw, wish I had one of those!).
Usually everyone here is trying to push render time down, down, down !

If I have a criticism it is only that it is very clean: you could dirty it up with "dirty" textures if you want to, but as you know all that takes time - you would need to UV things and make "dirty" textures for them. There are scrapes on the safety stripes down the side, but they kind of don't make sense - how would they be scratched that way?

Well done, keep up the good work.

Yea I thought it looked too "clean" myself. I tried my best but to be honest I got tired of the laborious project of making a change and render to see the final. I even tried the SHIFT-B trick to render a portion of it but even that was starting to consume an hour or so depending on what I had selected.

The scrapes were sort of what I was going after and you do have a point there but I took them off in one iteration and it just didn't look right to me; again too clean

Maybe you should try and cut your render time - there are various tricks that shave it down while still giving a result as good as that you have posted. There was a thread here on BU about that not long ago, can't recall the name though. Have a search.

From memory, the simplest is to lower oversampling (OSA) and turn off radiosity - although that might affect your neat lights.

Render settings is a whole subject in itself, and I'm no expert on it but with your awesome beast of a computer I think you should be able to get a much faster render. Have an experiment with stuff, see what works.

Nice one !

damn... im getting an i7 with 4gb ram and i thought that would mean no more 7 hour renders oh well... if your useing radiosity to make those lights i would look into doing it with nodes instead.. .that would vastly speed up render times... although i think radiosity is baked before hand so you've probly already baked so that won't really help.

anyway awesome work dude it looks really cool and well detailed.

Sweet!

It looks to me like your floor squares are showing through those sheets of paper...how did you get that to work?

Also, you forgot to set-smooth some things; noticeably your fire-extinguisher looking thing next to the fuel, and the joints on your brown pipes. And it seems you used exactly the same texture for both hazard stripes.

All in all, excellent; probably above where I am now, at least for lighting! Really great job, dude. If you're looking into speeding things up a bit...well, I don't know how you did all of this, but if the floor is geometry, replacing it with a UV map would cut out a LOT of verts; also, the ceiling, if it's done with geometry, might be faster with arrays. Not sure how much of a difference arrays make, though.

For a first project this is really good work. I like all the detail in the scene.

Your long render time suggests to me that your model might contain quite a lot of vertices in it. Often you can fake resolution in your model through clever use of textures or by using bump and normal maps. As Profnull suggested, the scene does look a little too clean and clinical. Textures will help to roughen it up and add more realism.

Nice stuff though.

Looks nice, but really 7 hours?
My only complaint has already been addressed: its too clean.

I love it, I am getting an alienware computer 4 christmas, I was just gonna get 6 GB RAM, do I need more?

Wow, lots of responses so far!

@Goliath: Thank you very much!

@Hamsterhill: I tried to bake them but every time I do it says "Error nothing to bake" or something like that. Havent really played with baking stuff yet but I do get the concept. Any links to a tutorial would be great even if its on wiki blender. Yes the rendering is intensive but the nice part about the i7 is it doesnt' make your system useless while it's churning away: You can still play your favorite MMO or watch a movie while its working it's magic

@PNG_pyro: Aw darn they're still showing through! That was an error I thought I corrected when I made that decal. It a plane with a 100% alpha for it's color. It looks like parts of the colors from the papers graphic are showing through. I guess Weyland Yutani prints their stuff on tracing paper lol Oddly enough about the set-smooth stuff: I did. I know I did and I can't get those flat spots to go away. I even tried to create new cylindars and use 512 faces for it and it still didnt fix it

@absenceofcolour: The rule of thumb is the rendering takes more CPU power whereas displaying the results uses GPU (graphics card) like in PC games. And more ram ALWAYs helps. Blender was using about 3.5Gb of ram to render this one but I think you should be okay with 6. Second rule of thumb is (especially if you're running Vista) you should always leave at least 1.5Gb of ram for the OS itself.


Thanks agian for the suggestiosn/comments gang! I'll remember "dirty is good" for next time

Hmmm...It's weird that setsmooth didn't work for you.

Is it possible that you have duplicates there? Possibly in a different layer? Although duplicates in the same space tend to cause crazy fractal-looking dark lines.

I actually thought that the floor showing through the paper was pretty cool. Yeah, a bit of dirt really makes things look more realistic. You could probably even add a bit in GIMP, right now...

This seems to be an error in blender. I had that smoothing-trouble myself before, I guess I solved it by turning off subsurf. Don't know why this worked, but it did.

@PNG_pyro: I thought about doing some "touch up" work in GIMP but right now I'm gonna have to take the long path and do it the proper way; I'm planning on making an animated first-person scene. A friend of mine is making the alien model and we'll see how that goes

@Prometheus: Yea it is strange. After subsurfing a number of times (especially on curved surfaces) it just doesn't like to set smooth for some reason. I was hoping I could just turn its reflection down and have it absorb less ambient light to cover it up... didnt work I guess

So...wait, are you using subsurf on those cylinders, then? Cuz I don't think they'd need it...and it adds a LOT of unnecesary faces.