Ice Flow

[GunnerMan]

Well thanks to DRGfx I was able to get my ice flow working. This was a quickie I did because it was late in the day and I wanted to give it a shot to see how it turned out. Overall it turned out Ok for the very little time I put into it so far. I could have softened up the edges a bit and adjusted the scale a bit but it's going somewhere.

The Ice textures I used for the side of the flows and the side of the "Glacier" that I got from The Willow Grove ( http://www.the-willow-grove.com/vue/vue ... mats1.html ) are EXTREMLEY slow to render wich is why I only rendered this small picture with the "Final" render preset. It took 40 minutes, at any decent size and up the render quality we are looking at a 10-17 hour render time. Because of this it has made it extremely hard for me to do any tweaking to textures, atmosphere, etc because each preview takes about 10 minutes.

Here it is


I do like Karens ice/snow materials but they just render to slow for any large use. Tomorrow I am going to try and find a new ice/snow material that will look good both on the side and on top of my ice that renders at a decent speed. Are there any ice textures for sale here at geekatplay?

[vovka]

looking nice, ice always take long time to render SS material

[kepli]

Nice start ... :D

That Willow Grove site is awesome ... just downloaded everything I could grab. Will take a look at the packs on Renderosity as well :) 8)

[GunnerMan]

Hmm well I guess I will need to live with the slow render time then. Ill just assign colors or render areas/selected items to preview I guess. The stained glass is not as random as the actuall thing but it will do.

[Paula Sanders]

I often render at final for testing purposes because I can see details better than at preview. With some textures it can take over 10 minutes. I, then, know it will be a long render later on at 2400 x 1800 which is what I use as my final.

I have a relatively fast dual core computer. At least for me that can be normal. I have purchased the Willow Grove packs and I like them. Rendering is tedious and time consuming. I have final re-rendered one picture now 2 times at 10 hours each because I didn't like the way the eco-system looked. I still don't like it, but I am experimenting with combining two ecos from different versions. I'll see how that looks.

This example just shows how one thing can increase the render time. I used a large metacloud saved as a VOB I think (I'm on a different computer and can't check as I'm rendering on the other one) as a mist texture. With it the 10 hour rendering. Without the metacloud and at a higher AA with texture, 2 hours. Just thought I'd throw that in to show how one object can cause such a variation.

[GunnerMan]

Thanks for the input. Interesting how something that seems so simple can be such a long render. I guess that simple thing is really a complicated thing mathmatecly.... Yeah I have given up on my ice scenes for now. My computer must turn off at night because it is phase cooled wich translates to lots and lots of noise. That wont do at night so renders I do must be during the day or I need to stay up for them.

[aegean]

Yep those over night renders don't go down well in my house either - for some reason my 4 years old just doesn't understand the sacrifices needed for Vue :P

Also that killed my last desktop.......