Creating shots with objects in far distance

[TomD_Arch]

So I was wanting to explore creating an image based on a photograph I took of the Chicago sky line.

 

 

I started out by creating objects to scale and at real distances.

 

 

Well as soon as I adjust the vray camera's zoom or focal length to bring the distant building to the appropriate scale, the rendering hangs and crashes. I realize it may just be a memory issue because of the distances involved even with just simple objects, but really I'm curious...

 

How would any of you go about trying to recreate this kind of image?

[James Vella]

Change your system units to kilometers, reset the scene, merge in your skyline into this file. Doing this in your current scene won't work.

 

Keep your mesh close to 0,0,0. Odd things will happen too far from 0, including camera shake.

[TomD_Arch]

No, that just puts your model out of scale and does weird stuff with the lighting set up.

 

set to feet and merged model into new scene .

 

If I set scene to miles and merge its so out of scale I can't even get the camera to work right.

 

I'm wondering if this has something to do more with the image I created with my camera is fooling me because of something like auto-focus being turned on? Like maybe the camera had to cheat this thing in order to create that image so in Max you need need to cheat your shot in a similar way?

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Edited April 17, 2017 by thomas.denney@gmail.com

[thomascoote]

No, that just puts your model out of scale and does weird stuff with the lighting set up.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]55412[/ATTACH] set to feet and merged model into new scene .

 

If I set scene to miles and merge its so out of scale I can't even get the camera to work right.

 

I'm wondering if this has something to do more with the image I created with my camera is fooling me because of something like auto-focus being turned on? Like maybe the camera had to cheat this thing in order to create that image so in Max you need need to cheat your shot in a similar way?

Save

 

Yea, changing system units will do that. Collapse all your geometry to editable poly and go to Utilities>More>Rescale World Units.

 

If your original scene was in, say meters and you adjusted units to KM, you'd scale by 1000.

 

Make sure everything is as close to 0 as possible before you do this. As has been said, things get far away from 0 it's gonna go to hell regardless of unit setup.

[Francisco Penaloza]

When working with large project ( Square footage not polygon) I set my scene to use Feet or Meters; not larger than that because camera setting get weird.

Having said that I don't think there is a relation of scale and crashing your scene, maybe because you are using displacement in your water?? are you??

Also remember the Light Cache can be setup as world scale or screen size. then it will affect your RAM usage.

With the latest VRay I barely use Irradiance, usually is Brute force and LC and sometimes just brute force, that way you save a lot in memory.

[James Vella]

http://area.autodesk.com/learning/3ds-max-understanding-3ds-max-units-and-project-scale-part-1?src=social

 

More information from the 3ds manual on scene scale and working with large scenes

 

(its actually a very informative video on the elusive system units in 3dsmax) enjoy

Edited April 19, 2017 by redvella