Landscape

[josema]

Hi all!

 

I'm currently working on this landscape illustration for a book cover. There are a couple of problems I'm encountering. First of all, I'm using a hair material for the leaves on the trees, but when I render it out, A:M simply crashes. I think the problem is that I don't have enough system resources. I'm running v11c on a 2.4 Pentium 4 with 512mb of RAM.

 

Anyway, there's still a lot of texture work to be done, and details to be added. The biggest challenge for me thus far, is the leaves for the trees. I must say, I'm struggling with this. The water texture is also another challenge that I must tackle pretty soon.

 

Please let me know what you guys think. All suggestions welcomed.

 

Thanks.

[lazz]

I used to try and render large scenes like this and it also crashed for me too. But I figured out that if I was only going to use the one frame (because its a still picture) I would only need to render the first frame. So I set the frame range on the rendering window to start at 00:00:00 and end at 00:00:01. I was then able to render the image and it did not crash. Hopefully the same will work for you. (I hope that all made sense. If not, here is a picture of what I'm talking about.)

[luiggie_san]

Thanks for the reply Robert.

 

The thing is, that I've tried that already. I always render to disk using the advanced options to make sure everything is as it should, and always use from frame 0 to frame 0 settings. The interesting thing is that after making some tests, I notice that if I hide some objects in the choreography and then render, it seems to work just fine. So I'm thinking, maybe it's a texture overload on the system resourses themselves. But than again, what do I know?

 

Thanks for your help though, it's nice to know that this sort of thing don't just happen to me .

[josema]

Ooops! Sorry guys, I'm using my friend's computer and forgot he was logged in using his username.

 

So the thread before this is one is really mine.

[Animus]

Hi Josema!

 

I like your composition. I think it is a very well done so far.

It approaches what many illustrators do with paper. Nice harmonious colors.

I was going to say it looked appropriate for a book cover, but you did

not tell us what kind of book it was.

 

Keep us posted.

[josema]

It's a Storybook of a collection of short stories. These are children's stories that are tipical of Puerto Rican literature. So of course, the cover will reflect the palette and flavor of Puerto Rico, but for children.

 

Thanks for asking.

[Guest mrsl13]

Ok, Im getting plenty of crashes to desktop with hair rendering in V11c...Try shutting OFF anything in the hair material your not using..Dynamics (if you want Dyn. on try looking under its properties to see if there are settings there you dont need active for you scene) ,Shadows, etc.

 

Good luck..and I do like you landscape ,looking good,

 

Mike

[Randy]

Hi guys/gals,

 

If either of you (josema or mrsl13) have repeatable crashes, we would love to have those projects. We don't have any hair crashes in house. If you send them in to support@hash.com, I'm sure we can have it fixed and in the next release.

 

Thanks,

Randy

[D.Joseph Design]

Sounds like your memory could be the problem; either your physical RAM or your system's virtual memory. I often experienced crashes with test renders from my "March of the Rubber Duckies" until I maxed-out the VM. If you have the hard drive space, try setting the minimum to 2,048 MB and max to 4,096 MB. If you have multiple 7200 RPM HDs, do this for each drive; restart your computer and try it again.

[Guest mrsl13]

I'll take a look at my virtual memory again I may have it set to large if thats possiable. I have also had it set on a separate drive also, but not at present. I do my AM on a laptop only, but dont know if that would have anything to do with anything...I know that I cant have shadows on in hair material or I have problems.

Im guessing that consolodating my project would be the best way to send in a project....

 

Mike

[josema]

Hi again!

 

Just wanna let ya’ll know about the progress of the scene I’m making. In case you’re wondering, I used Bryce 5 for all textures and materials, and it’s actually rendered in Bryce. I can do this, do to the fact that this scene is for a “still” that will be used as a cover illustration, so I don’t have to worry much about animation, although Bryce has animation capabilities, but very limited as far as I can tell.

 

The thing that caught my attention about Bryce, was that this particular scene calls for lots of trees. Something that the “tree lab” in Bryce can really help with. Back in AM, I was using the new hair system in version 11 for this job, but my computer was slowing down to a halt everytime I applied the hair materials to all the trees I originally had in the scene.

 

Another thing worth mentioning is that Bryce has, in my opinion, an excelent materials editor and of course, lots of presets. You can tweak these to your hearts content, very similar to how you can tweak the “darktrees”. It would be fantastic if we could have a plug-in similar to “simbiont” were we could bring these procedurals to AM. Sure you could use “darktree”, but you’d have to spend twice as much money buying it, and being a Mac user, I‘m up the creek with Darktree. Or is it down the creek? Anyway, I think you get my message.

 

All models were imported into Bryce from AM in 3ds format. I was pleasantly surprised on how well they imported (some meshes were smoothed out in Bryce).

 

Oh yeah, almost forgot, to render in Bryce is to develop an ulser, because it is extremely s-l-o-w. Even if you have the latest and badest machine, Bryce does not care. The only positive thing about it’s render is that it includes a netrender. So all you need now is a render farm.!!!

[modernhorse]

Terrific ! I love this look.

 

The tree on the right looks as though it could pounce. Can it move? Is this part of Puerto Rican lore?

 

Great job on this.

 

Doug

[josema]

Thanks Doug.

To answer your question. Nothing here moves as of yet. It is as still as it gets. But once the texturing and lighting is completely done, I plan on animating a few things like the ripples in the water and the leaves on trees, etc. But this would be just for fun.