Enrico Cerica shares the creation process of his image 'River Side' in this written tutorial on 3DTotal.com.
Enrico writes:
When I started this project I didn't know precisely where I was going with it. I had no reference images, but I knew that I wanted to show some water and surrounding nature with a nice house in the middle.
One of the main challenges was to be able to render such a huge scene with only 3GB of video memory including geometry and textures. I also had to take into consideration the limitation of 64 RGB textures and 32 gray textures.
Link
7 Comments
Wow! Impressive renders.
I know this is not the best forum to say this, but Cycles is noticeably much faster now. Even the viewport render clears up so soon. Branched path tracing = epic win!
Cycles is decent in most scenes, but add multiple layers of transparency shaders (i.e. leaves, or grass), and you're screwed. From the link: "The rendering time varies from 30 min to 1h, and here, some images were rendered in 3840x2000 in less than 1h." - Cycles wouldn't come anywhere close to that with so many trees
I'm working on a shot at the moment that's a medium-close-up of a character in a tree, about 35% of the frame is filled with leaves.
With transparency bounces (min and max) on 2, and all other bounces (diffuse, glossy...) on 0, it renders in 24 seconds. With the same transparency bounces, but all other bounces on 32, it takes 37 seconds. Now increasing transparency bounces to 32 and decreasing other bounces to 2, the render time jumps to just over 5 minutes.
All renders done with Branched Path Tracing, 4 AA samples and 2 diffuse. They're very noisy, it takes 256 AA samples for a clean render. We're not doing final renders in Cycles, so I haven't bothered to find out how long that takes (I'll try that tonight, but I'm not even sure it'll finish one frame by tomorrow). And remember, this is just one tree.
Cycles is slow. That's the only CURRENT down side of this amazing render engine. It's node system is brilliant. I get exactly what I envision. I It balances flexibility and control perfectly.
Rendered in Octane...?
yes, Cycles is faster now, and that ranks it a very slow renderer. And it is noisy as hell. I hate the noise thing, you render in vray and it's so smooth and realistic (and fast). Couldn't Cycles developers come up with some kind of average smooth algorithm? much of the time spent rendering in Cycles is just to clean the image of noise, not really adding detail. Something like bilateral defocussing node but integrated in the renderer, so it would use geometry edges, and not image edges to apply blur??
I have been using Blender with Octane for over a year now. It's really impressive and significantly faster than cycles.
Awesome, great to see he took the time to show us how he did this amazing rendering!!! Thanks bigtime Enrico!