Artist's Comments
This is a set of close-up details from my picture "Sailing the Seven Skies". As often happens, the high res original has a lot of smaller scale details that just don't come through when the image is scaled down - so here are some of them.
This was another 3DS Max rendered scene that - maybe because of my experiments with particles, displacement maps, hair effects, and lots and lots of memory, crashed frequently as I worked on it. So I rendered it in several layers which I composited in Photoshop at the end. The sky backdrop was the first layer, followed by the island and buildings, followed by the fog and mist effects, followed by the rockets, followed by their trails, and finally I rendered the little monorail section alone. That was mainly because I didn't want to place the train till I was done with the rockets. The island uses displacement maps, and I tried several disastrous techniques for adding foliage to it; I used the Hair & Fur modifier, which did do some nice grass effects, but crashed often; I tried Afterburn particles, which did do some nice shrubbery efects, but, you guessed it, crashed often; so finally I used the biggest possible hammer and just added some of the "Banyan Tree" architectural tree primitives, converted them to mesh objects, and modified them. I'm pretty pleased with the way that worked out, actually, though I wish I had back those few days when I was trying everything else. I'm sort of asking for it, I guess, with the resolution of the image and the size of some of my texture maps. The buildings were textured at a pretty high resolution since when I made them I knew I'd be getting close in. But here I don't, so I scaled those maps down. And the same goes for the rockets and characters. So there was a lot of optimizing to do to conserve memory, but even then there just wasn't enough (out of two gigabytes!) to render much of the scene at one time. Sometimes when this happens I remind myself that I started doing this sort of thing at 14 megahertz, with one meg of RAM, and that either cheers me up, or it doesn't, depending. |
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Comments
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Lancaster
Pardon my silly question, but what is the advantage of using "displacement" maps over "bump" maps?
I'm a newbie, but isn't a displacement map an image that perturbs a mesh in 3d
while a bump map is a texture that causes the rendering engine to shade a surface as if it is 3d?
Seems like the extra polygons created by the displacement map would cause some computer trouble, perhaps? Or do displacement maps look just so much better that it is worth the extra rendering time?
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“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead
When you're doing displacement you start with a pretty low res object, then add resolution to it so the displacement has something to work with. Depending on the type of map (or maps) you use, it can be very good for making natural looking surfaces based on simple geometry. Since you can turn the displacement off in the viewports, you're just manipulating the low res object in your scene.
All that's why it's worth doing, but you're right that it can cause problems. You do use that much more memory during render time, and really complex displacement maps seem to make Max soggy and hard to light. I seem to find that using Mix maps in displacement is asking for trouble, though the results are worth it; but using two or three Mix maps within a single displacement map ends up being Russian Roulette.
The reason that sort of thing is worth doing is that with Mix maps you can mask out parts of the terrain so that different maps are controlling the displacement of craggy rocks and, for example, level dirt - with smooth or rough transitions in between. I'm using a Vertex color channel to control those transitions here, as well as a bitmap texture for another transition.
I have a feeling that Max needs to allocate contiguous blocks of memory for those Mix maps, which would explain why things get hairy when you use more than one in the same material. Adding more polys to the scene really didn't present any problems, but there seem to be cases where Max just doesn't recover well when it fails to allocate memory for some complicated textures.
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Bradley W. Schenck
Saga Shirts - the Celtic art your mother WARNED you about: [link]
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[link] The Work Of [link]
Great job, whatever you did.
NICE WORK
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Like your presentation too
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