OTOY Forums

Hi all.

Here is a project some of you may recognize...The bubble of the helmet has appeared in the forums from time to time, when I was having trouble getting it to render properly. But Octane has matured greatly since those Octane Beta days, and I was finally able to finish this project, recently.

This is an Apollo program space helmet with measurements taken from actual components. It will be in a book I have been working on for many years that will cover the entire suit & accessories, and portable life support system. It will show how all the mechanisms work and Octane will be used for the majority of the renderings.

I hope you all enjoy the images!

Great level of details. The inside white (leather?) material is very impressive.
Please say something more about render times and kernel settings.

The render times were unfortunately over-the-top. I like high poly counts, but the head pad needed both bump and displacement, and that was one of the reasons my counts went sky high. Octane does not yet support displacement, so I had to run the headpad through Blender, using the displacement map I used in Maxwell in order to make the displacement an actual part of the mesh. That drove the poly count to an insanely high amount to hold the fine detail in the folds, and limited the resolution of all my other bitmaps in the project, due to maxing out my GPU memory. So the crazy poly counts in the pad plus the subsurface treatment of the blue tabs produced typical render times of around 77hrs times 5 renders composited in Photoshop.

But the main reason for having to do 5 passes, was not the headpad...It was caused by the subsurface material mix in the blue tabs causing noise that just wouldn't clear up, especially in low light areas. It was happening in the clear glue-line, too.

I really wanted to have finer more numerous hairline scratches in the bubble, but I had no memory left to hold finer scratches than what you see, here.

Kernel was PMC. Three studio lights plus various reflectors plus daylight to cut down on contrast. Maybe my lighting setup was the REAL reason for the noise problems.