Im not feeling very satisfied with the way this has gone. Had some trouble again with textures, and getting zbrush to do what i wanted it to do. Thought just chucking some things on might reveal some ideas for ways to take it forward, but no such concrete luck. So after a day where I feel Ive more gone backwards than forwards, heres where its at...

another update.

sorry. I meant to post this one.

Im wondering whether ive gone in the wrong direction with this. The original dragon model had a sort of realistic look and feel, or at least, it was heading in that kind of direction. I think i might have cheapened it by the scene ive put it in, which has a sort of cartoony feel to it. Im thinking i should go back to where i was in the third post in this thread and continue from there just concentrating on the dragon.


Anybody have any views?

Hi Ben
You could use photo of jungle or what ever to find the setting that most fits him, play about a bit..........dave

I keep looking at this, and although im feeling a bit torn whether to continue or go back to an earlier stage, i keep seeing stuff. I keep picturing like an oldish dwark/elf kind of character pulling him along, and the colours of the background make me see like a patch of fog across an ocean, sort of greeny a bit sinister, and then a shipwreck and/or a mountain/volcano in the background.

I just dont know how much of it i could get in without crashing.

... this might sound like a bit of a crazy home scientist idea, but we've all heard of computer 'farming' yeah.... how easy is it, if at all possible, to connect computers together to get more power/memory/capability.. has anyone tried it? theres an old computer sitting around my place, windows xp, whereas mine is vista, its really crap and old, but would it be possible?

this is what i can see to add, amongst other things!

Well you can render stuff out in layers. If the pc laying around is old and "crap" it would hardly be worth it, especially since there is only one. When you said "old" and Windows XP, slow single core cpu was the first thing I thought and you'd be setting yourself up for disappointment if you actually expected anything from it, though I'd find it fun to try.

Ive mentioned it to a few people, who've all kinda laughed at me. I just get carried away with seeing little things i want to add. at school in art i always liked adding little details that you might not see when you first looked but might notice the second or third time. I guess I need to upgrade computer or at least to windows 7 if i want any realistic chance of improving performance.

was the same with my bee scene. kind of just carried on going and going, but had to stop when it got too much for the computer.
i dont know. i wanta try displacing some more of the foreground elements in this, but dont think ill get away with it

when you say render stuff out in layers, do you mean that you can render say, just the floor, and all the computing power will go into just that, and then say, the background, the paint effects etc all seperately. I was watching that alex alvarez tutorial, and he loaded the alpha channel of a character in photoshop to isolate it and then add a background. I find it hard to get my head around how that works, if you render everything seperate and then composite and have it all end up looking like its part of the same scene. Do all renders automatically have an aplha channel?

very wierd evening. Maya was being good to me! wanted to try out some displacement maps on a few of the objects, and every time got a result almost straight off. I dont understand, even on the dragon's body, it hasnt ripped apart any seems, not that i can notice anyway.

unfortunately after all that i sat and waited about an hour for it to render and then once it had finished it wiped the image and decided to render all over again. Thanks Maya!

Heres an update rendered previous. Nothing major, just the floor and wall displaced a bit.

Yes. If its not in the layer it won't be considered, sooo don't forget about your lights and such :x. You can even customize the render settings per layer.

By default that is enabled, of course you can specify otherwise. Though, if you render out to something like jpeg or bmp then you're stuck because those formats only store rgb data.

having decided to add a kind of cart to the right hand side of the scene, i got to the point i figured was coming, and mental ray 'out of memory'.


so... started having a little read and look for alpha channel info. I see there is a checkbox in the render settings, and as you say genny, it is checked by default. I saved out my test renders as Tiffs.

Its a bit strange because im thinking its hard to isolate elements if theyre all casting shadows. And also in the first few quick renders I did, all thats really happening is the background (if there is none) gets isolated from all the actual 'positive' objects.

im guessing theres a way to give individual geometry its own alpha channel?

But then Im thinking...shadows. I first of all isolated the cart in my scene and rendered it, then added it to a previous wip, but obviously it therefore had no shadow. So i rendered it with all the lights and anything that would be affecting its lighting or vice versa, but then that includes most of the stuff in the seen so... all i left out was the dragon. which was enough to get a render, but when compositing them I wasnt really sure how to go about it. I basically cropped half of one picture and then stuck it on top of the other, which left a blatant vertical line down the middle of the picture where theres a subtle shift in tones. Im sure i went about the process in a completely crude amateur way. Will have to look into this more....


and i see there is a way of rendering shadows in their own alpha channel involving switching off primary visibility and using the use background shader... again... much to explore.

update

just experimenting some more with extending the image. Been looking over some photoshop tutorials so have been wanting the practice...