Cycles Island Revisited vol.2
This gorgeous nature scene contains one trillion polygons, I think that’s a new record!
Peter Baintner writes:I wanted to make a waterfall in Blender, and I needed a scene therefore. So I took the original Island from Agus3D, and basically made everything new, apart from the trees.
One frame to render took 1 hour. I’ve used 450 000 Instances of the trees + bushes and rocks. So all in all that are at least a trillion polys Blender tells me, he uses 1877mb memory, Windows says that its 12gb. The final film was rended with 500 samples in 2.5k.
Music is by Jan Morgenstern! Hope you’ll like it!
This is ridiculously beautiful.
Very beautiful….
Poetic even!
Awesome! I want to see a whole blender movie made like this.
Beautiful! However, the tree’s do look unrealistic in the flyover for some reason, resembling some sort of carpet.
It’s because of the lack of atmosphere (mist) – ordinarily, objects in the distance become faded, which is why Internal had an Atmosphere render option… I’m not quite sure why Cycles doesn’t have an option like this. Maybe the world volume setting can fix this if used correctly.
Just fake that with compositing and Z pass ;-)
there’s definitely atmosphere in the scene (see the distant mountains towards the end where its most pronounced). i think the bigger issue with the carpet effect is uniformity. trees look like they could be the same model with a little rotational/scale variation. probably needs to be 2-3 distinct species, with more colour variation, density variation, and mid-scale ground displacement. also littering a few “landmark” features through the scene can give the eyes places of interest, rather than focussing on expanses of similarity.
that said, this is still gorgeous and an awesome demo of blender and cycle’s scalability! i’d be curious how much ram the system had at its disposal. i’ve got 16gb on my laptop, and access to render blades with 24gb. i’ve done some biggish scenes, but nothing approaching this scale!
Cycles does have a mist pass option in its renderlayer settings tab. You can adjust the pass or the mist values within the worldsettings tab (when cycles is set as active render engine of course). This pass is anti-aliased and easy to set up and really easy to comp in. The Z-Pass (in my workflow at least) doesn’t work as well due to edgefringe (alpha areas like background) and other nodes to set it up.
Very beautiful and well done ! Very nice and clean. I like the camera movement very much too, the hills, the water of the sea, the sunrise, it reminds me at some Middle Earth and Lord of the Rings scenes :-)
I agree with the criticism of the trees. The height of your trees is very different (more than necessary in my opinion), but their REPETITION is NOT RANDOM ENOUGH. A too frequent repetition of the same (different) shapes. That makes it too regular and unnatural. But that’s easier said than done.
A great scene anyway ! A very successful attempt. We are all jealous :-)
watching again just for the camera move. i agree its really gorgeous. real sense of flight, no awkward keyframes or interpolation curves! would love to see more people share techniques on this. i know i had to do a few for a tv series i worked on, and it was always way more challenging than it might appear!
this is indeed beautiful. the trees however, when theyre tight together, look a bit like a big pile of moss. maybe more variety in kinds and heights of trees?
Exactly my thoughts, it simply doesn’t look very realistic from above. I believe it’s more than just the height, though.
This truly was an amazing next step in the landscape-generation genre! Great music, rich color, smooth animation… (took a little too much from the Abrams’ school of lens flares, but… ☺) It’s a shame that the human eye is so hard to fool. As others have mentioned, the forest was a giveaway: repetition of the tree geometry, even though not a pattern, appeared as such. Could have used different types of vegetation in different areas. Also, when swooping down to the ocean I began to notice the surf was static. Amazing levels of realism, tho! Kudos here.
Absolutely stunning animation and composition. At times you can get fooled into thinking this is a real landscape. Great when software can mimic nature so well that it can trick the mind and fool the eye. Anyway, it’s a great showpiece for the power of Blender and one great portfolio piece for the creators involved. Well done!!
Thank you so much!!!! You gave me so much will to continue working in Blender!!! before you, I thought blender would not be able to render high poly scenes – you changed my World !!!! thank you so much !!!