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Hi ! You may remember the adventure of Elisabeth Warfield lost in Sahara some years ago. My favourite character is back. This winter, she does an internship with a park ranger in the Rocky Mountains ! I enlarged and improved the set around the ranger station that I built some time ago.

I hope that she will not meet a bear, but who knows ?

Ski tracks in the snow are hardly made by hand drawing in Photoshop Elements. In a close future, they could be in real relief, but I have to made several alternative grounds for all poses and the subdivision level must be very high to allow nice prints, and I am close to my System RAM and VRAM limits, even in 1920x1080. So, no Hi Resolution posters possible.

A serie of images can be seen here :

http://3d-synthesis.com/56-RangerStation.html

The second image shows various sets of clothes for Elisabeth. In the future, she could be an helicopter pilot for the park ranger, or participate to the Rally of Canada, as she is also Canadian !

pretty good - I think you need slight variations of colour in the snow around the skier, usually it has a slight blue tinge in deeper areas ( which might help to fake the SSS look ), the snow is looking a bit too monochrome atm.

You are right. I have rendered all images in Direct Lighting Kernel to save render time, and because there was a difference only in some small areas ( windows, sun glasses ) I didn't used SSS for the character's skin because it required pathtracing for SSS with much grain and a so long render time !

The problem with snow prints and soft shadows will be solved when I will have created a more subdivided ground with real prints. I will also add some small snow flakes here and there with particles (real grain) , on the surface.

Currently, some subtle corrections have been done in post pro here and there, but not on every image.

EDIT : I have done some tests with real displacement for ski traces : much work for poor results so far. The ground mesh must be very subdivided in the areas with traces, and the result is either too smooth or to sharp with visible faces/angles. I haven't yet found the good average. So far, the effect on VRAM amount waste is huge.

One more image added to the serie :

Hello, now you can explore the surrounding of the ranger station, with a VR tour !

Click on red points and play with the mouse and wheel.

http://3d-synthesis.com/RangerStation_01.html

It is a first trial. I have to learn more about VR.

ROUBAL wrote:Hello, now you can explore the surrounding of the ranger station, with a VR tour !

Click on red points and play with the mouse and wheel.

http://3d-synthesis.com/RangerStation_01.html

It is a first trial. I have to learn more about VR.

Nice scene and use of the spherical camera, it's like a point-'n-click adventure game

Thank you ! I couldn't leave this great tool unused, so I invested in a VR software !

Why do you not use PMC kernel despite 2 x GTX 580 SLi?

looking good Roubal ~ quick question about your hair and the fur ~ what program is that and what hair system?

@nuno1980 : I didn't enabled Sli : it is not compatible with Octane.

I have tried with Pathtracing and PMC kernels as well : there is no visible difference in such external scenes, except in small areas with glass (sunglasses and windows), and obviously a very longer render time. So I just fixed some areas in post prod, like too much light inside the wooden house through the window.

I also tried with Pathtracing to get SSS on Elisabeth's face : very longer render time for not convincing result.

@solomon : As a Blender user, I used the instance script written by Matej for instancing fur. I used a special trick for fur : As instances allow a gain of memory space only if the geometry takes more room in memory than the list of instances coordinates, I didn't made individual hair, but instead I instanced a pompom made of thin hair of various shapes. It gives better results on sharp contour, where individual hair would leave visible the cloth mesh.

For example : The contour of the hood of the anorak is made of 5000 pompoms. Each real pompom on tip of the red cords is made of 50 litle pompoms emitted from a single small square face.

The collar of the jacket is made of 5000 pompoms as well.

The setup is tedious, because for each pose of Elisabeth, I may have from one to three scatter nodes to generate, for the fur. As the exporter doesn't work for particles, I have to make them real before exporting. I use a template false hair object to avoid low performance when exporting. The pompom is added actually in Octane.