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As this WIP seems to be enough advanced to be considered as finished, at least until I'll find a better mapping method for some textures, I post it in this gallery section :

I think it's a great render, but some things aren't right.
I'd not use people in it, people are not very realistic. A parked car in front of a police station is fine too.

Also, the lighting is a bit too uniform, maybe try a bit of sun.

Radiance

Hi Radiance, I'm happy to see you back home. I hope that you feel better.

I wanted to add some life, but characters have always been one of my weakest points.

I have tried some other interesting lightings and different angles, but I'm currently limited by the dimension (weight also) of the set.

I will try other renderings when I will have added some walls on the sides to give more freedom to the camera and also improved
the mapping of the stone textures, because I have added some details like dirt in post prod.

The current mapping methods I used (Cubic and diagonal projection mapping) don't allow painting directly on the texture, because all the surface of the texture is shared by many stones.

This method allows more randomness in the aspect of the stones but doesnt allow painting chosen areas of the walls.

I will try to use multiple UV system and at least two textures layers, and then maybe I'll be able paint on one of the two textures and to mix them in Octane. Maybe I'll have to create also an alpha mask, as PNG with transparency are not supported for textures.

Some interesting experiments...

So I come back to the WIP section !

png with transparency is supported.

just load your png into your diffuse channel as an image.
and load the same png (it will use the same data, so it's not larger in memory consumption) on the alpha channel as a 'alphaimage' node.

that's 2.3 only though...

Radiance

OK ! Thanks for the trick ! For several reasons, I have not yet used 2.3 much.
I still use 2.2.

Main problem i see is that your light hits from above, so you don't have interesting shados. Maybe change the position of the sun to hit the car more towards it's front, so the side is shadowed and you will get nice shadows on the walls. This is going to improve your image quite substantially, because you will get a feeling of space and form from the shadows.

I didn't want a plain sunny day. I had set the sun location to get both sky reflection in windows and transparency allowing to see the sky through the front and side windows in the upper left corner of the image.

I will try better lighting when I will have solved my stones mapping problem. I have found a solution that should work fine, but I'll have much more work on arranging the texture of individual stones !

I have just ordered two ASUS GTX 480 ! They will give me more freedom with memory amount, because it's really hard to work always near the limits. I should get them next week.

i think you should have went for 2 GTX 460 with 2 GB each. They are already on sale from Palit/Gainward and the 460 has good speed, 80% of a 470, but 2 GB is a really big plus. I'm considering such a setup myself. Though, the 480s will serve you really well, though you won't have the ability to work with bigger scenes.

The choice has been difficult, but I wanted PNY or ASUS cards with standard specifications.

I had thought of one Tesla C1060 with 4GB, but it was over the price of two GTX480 and not much faster than my GTX 260, and two C1060
are over my current budget. I will see if I can do better later if I can find some clients, because I'm walking through a desert for a while !

I fear that custom cards with more memory would reach higher consumption and temperature,
and also Gainward cards seem to have bigger pipes than other more standard cards, and I was not sure they would fit in
the Cubix box. I may be wrong... Some may also have bigger airfans.

In the cubix, there is no more than 23mm on top of my current GTX260, and even ASUS cards have pipes on this side... I hope they will fit!

My Gainward GTX460 heats to max 72C during longer periods of rendering, so no problem with temperature. I don't know about consumption, but I run the system with a 550W PSU.
The card has a standard height of two slots. No big pipes or fans sticking 'out', everything is neatly inside the casing.


Nice police car, btw