I wanted to share some supplementary images and information surrounding my Render The Metaverse entry entitled: Macroverse.
The idea was to create a macro photography type environment, where the viewer gets the sense of being maybe a small creature in a big scene.
The elements were all created in C4D either modelled or procedurally. For the grass, plants, etc i used C4D Cloners and created a Python script to write the matrix values of the clones to separate text files - i could then load the text files into Octane Scatter nodes and use instanced geometry to distribute them in the scene ( if anybody is interested i'll be happy to share the Python script ). I was surprised actually by how well Octane chews up lots of instances, although in the end i had to roll back as the amount of geometry started to overwhelm my little NVidia 560Ti card
As the deadline was rapidly approaching and juggling moving house and work commitments left me with not much time, i ended up rendering with the Direct Lighting kernel despite myself. I literally didn't even have time to upload a 400mb scene to the Octane Render Cloud and so had to run with what i had. I think the results are good but would really have liked to have had more time to finesse lighting further and render with Path Tracing as my main regret is that the final version is a touch darker and less vibrant than it should be.
One other technique that i had developed during the production of the scene was custom z-depth. Because the built-in z-depth functions don't work with the Panoramic Camera ( z-depth is sortof rotated around the wrong axis ) what i did was create a simple circular gradient image, and map it onto the entire scene so that the center of the gradient sits where the pano camera sits. This way doing a really simple render with flat lighting i could create a quasi depth pass which worked in panoramic cubemap projections ( or in fact any projection ) and could then be used in post to add for example DOF blur or depth-based lightening/desaturation/etc. But again, in the end i didn't get to use that because A) i was dubious about using actual DOF in a stereo image and B) i was left with very little time. I would like to post up a couple of examples of this technique though so that maybe others can explore the idea further..
Anyway, thanks for reading and here is a link to my entry, and some additional no-frills renders of the scene:
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=97&t=49407
http://www.intothescreen.co.uk
http://www.vimeo.com/intothescreen