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I know it is way too fast, but it is a very first trial !

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/30205535[/vimeo]

I know that It is at least 2x or 3x too fast, but as I said it is only a first trial to test the behaviour of the camera.

I will have to animate the flag and the chimney smoke separately and composite them, as well as some other animated details that I have in mind, because the obj export time from Blender is currently more than 15 min and the loading time in Octane is the same. So, 30 min per frame at 25fps would require 31 days of rendering for 1 minute of animation ! As I plan to render in Full HD (1920x1080), it would be even much longer !

Rendered in 1280x720 (30 seconds per frame) in 1h20min.

I already found the stills excellent, but I guess that the animation will be awesome !!
I'm really admirative !

nice job, it's going to be a nice video for sure

excellent!

how you did the 3d snow?

with the 3ds max script?

As a Blender user, I don't know what script you are talking about.
I modelled everything by hand. If you are talking of the heavy snow on some firtrees, it is done by copy and extrusion of some faces of the branches, selected randomly.

EDIT: Today, I have thought a lot about how to help doing this project with compositing, and I think that before going further in this animation, I have to separate and render separately the central detailed area and the mountains in background, in two independent scenes. As the central area is like an island (a highpoint in the valley), it would be easy.

This will free much memory amount for both the central area and the mountains, and will allow me to add details where needed in the close landscape, and more trees (and better maybe) in background, as well as possibly a higher definition texture for the mountains (not sure yet, because they already require 150MB of memory).

I could even use Blender to render some parts of the outer scene to benefit from instances for trees... However, as I'd want to animate the daylight system, using Blender could be limited to some shots...

I still have to think about that and make some experiments to see the actual benefits in term of memory and evaluate all possible difficulties or advantages...

Very good !

How did you handle so many trees ?

Kind regards
Alain

Thanks Alain,

Well, there are around 12500 trees ! Less than 10 high resolution trees fully modelled, 500 partially modelled using flat textured surfaces,
and 12000 X-Billboards (two crossed billbnoards to keep correct shadows) for background trees.

The 500 partially modelled trees have between 1000 ad 1400 vertices each, and the X-billboards only 8 vertices (four triangles)each. There is still some room on my GTX 580 3GB, but not enough for more trees and some more props and details in the centrals area. Just enought to increase the resolution of the image up to Full HD.

Last night I have done a test with only the far mountains and 10000 partially modelled trees. I still have 400MB available on my GPUs, and the trees look much better, but 10000 if far from being enough. I would like 50000 at least. So I have to study an other kind of tree structure allowing more realism than my current X-Billboards, and less weight than the current partially modelled trees.

As the camera will mainly stay around the central area, setting the X-billboards to track the center of the scene around their Z axis would improve their look. However,I have an idea of an other kind of tree structure that could give good aspect in background with reasonable weight. I still have to test.

Rendering in two passes with the mountains separated should allow me to do what I want, at the cost of double work... but I think that it is worth it.

My main problem currently is that Blender can't handle so many real objects and freezes when I convert the particles system used to distribute the trees in real objects. I have found a work around solution that consist in generating only 1000 trees at once and joining them in a single object, and doing it several times with changing the Seed value of the particle system. But it is tedious, and slows down the process a lot, as I also have to set tracking constraints before joining the objects ! Also, generating trees this way leads to a lot of overlapping trees, that is a loss of ressources.

Trees population test :

I encounter big problems with Blender 2.59 not able to make particles real over around 3000 (My particles are modelled trees. More particles could be converted if simpler). The maximum I have been able to make real is 5000 with medium poly trees in 5 operations on 1000 trees each time (12500 with X-billboards in 10 operations), but I also encounter exportation problems with the obj exporter for 2.59 exporting nothing on some files.

So I had to come back to Blender 2.49b, and I made real 50 000 trees (5x10000) of 258 vertices each with textured branches and trunk, supporting relative close up view !

I exported them in obj in 7min 40s with the exporter for Blender 2.49.

The loading time in Octane is 41 minutes !

Win7x64 ressources monitor displayed 18.443GB... as my system has only 8GB, the 41 minutes are due to constant access to swap file.

The scene weights 2179MB in Octane of 2879MB available on my GPUs, and is composed of 10 120 200 triangles.

wow, really, just wow.

fun test, but vue owns on landscapes by a mile