skogskalle

agree with sawyer... dont try to see everything, or youll end up seing nothing (oh shit, i should be a philosopher, that was deep!) But seriously, if you have a couple of months you should focus on a few countrys max. Or atleast one part of the world... like go to South America and start in Brazil, make your way across to Bolivia and Peru and fly home from Santiago, Chile... (I will be doing this exact trip soon, and Ill have about 2,5 months, and Ill probably spend 2 of those in Brazil and Peru) Maybe south america isnt the best place to start if you want english speaking countries though... Im a bit worried about that myself, cause my spanish is horrible... A couple of years ago I flew to Singapore, and then worked my way up through Malaysia, Thailand, and then through Kambodja into Vietnam. (by bus) This is a very easy part of the world to travel in... many people speak english (atleast a little) and food and hotels etc are very cheap. I really liked Vietnam... Thailand is very beautiful too, if you stay away from the biggest tourism spots (like phuket for example)... Bangkok city is a must though. Huge, noisy, dirty and chaotic city but for some reason its also a really nice place to stay for awhile. If you want to see something new I would definetly recommend going to another part of the world... I mean, sure Berlin is nice, and there are many many many beautiful places in Europe, but youll always have those places close to home. There is nothing that stops you from visiting those places later, but you never know when you can take another 2-3 months vacation.... anywho... ill stop now... If you have any quesitions about travelling in south east asia or just travelling in general just ask and Ill try my best to answer...

I dont think vray has any problems with opacity anymore... Ive used xfrogtrees with opacitymapped leaves many times and they have never caused any troubles...

cause realism isnt always everything? Depends on the purpouse of the image of course, if realism is the goal then the DOF is way off... but if the image was done simply to look good and make the viewer intrested in the project, then Id keep it since it (IMO) makes it look better.

I love the DOF! its not realistic at all, in fact it makes the whole building look like a small model.... but it looks awsome =) I would keep it.

nice image! love all the small details... you said you used QMC + Lightcache GI. Are you using the Vlado universal settings or some other technique? when I use his settings my images always come out a bit noisy, even at low noise threshold values like 0,001. If you used his settings, what did you set your noise threshold to? I find that if you set it lower than 0,001 the renders take almost forever...

irradience map settings depend on the size of the render... so if your render looks good with settings -2, 0 at 640x480 you get the exact same quality with -3, -1 if you render at 1280x960, or -4, -2 at 2560x1920. The time it takes for the lightcache to calculate depends on the scene and not the size of the render (I think). So a complex interior will take lots of time even at low settings, but a simple exterior will be fast even if you use higher settings...

you have way too high settings for your Irradience map. You have the min - max settings at -2, 0 which is great for small renders, but its too much for your 2560x1400 render. try using -4, -2 instead. i dont know how many subdivs you have for your lightcache, but for a simple exterior like this you could set it to maybe 2000 and it should still calculate fairly fast.

nope... so far only the people who were at siggraph have recieved the dongles... not sure when the rest of us can expect to get them. Vlado said that they would start shipping the dongles soon after they come back from the US, (which would be about now) but since they have so many dongles to ship I think it can take a while to get them out.

you dont need any special tools or scripts for this... just use "attach" in the edit mesh, or edit poly modifier rollout. If you for example have a tree where the leaves, branches etc are different objects, you simply attach them together and it will automatically create a Multi/sub-object material for you. The mapping wont be changed either.

use "store with IRR-map" option on all your Vray lights. You will have to use higher settings for your IRR-map (since the quality of those lights now depends on the quality of your GI) and this will take longer than before, but the actual render will be much much faster.

chuck - I recently used xfrog trees on a project. if you use the standard materials they come with youll get horrible rendertimes... but if you make your own vray mats and set the filtering of all opacitymaps to "none", and set the blur value of both diffuse and opacitymaps to 0,01 you can easily cut the rendertimes in half, or more. The trees will look exactly the same and it wont take more than 5 min to convert the standard mats to vray...

The 3GB swith WILL help even though you only have 2 GB of RAM.... Cant remember the exact numbers, but without the switch MAX can only use about 1,5 GB before it crashes, and with the switch enabled you can go a little higher, to about 1,7 GB I think. Do a search for "3 GB switch" and youll find some threads on how to enable it.

I have 2 gig ram as well and have run out of memory on several projects... Try using the dynamic memory option, or enable the 3 gb switch... perhaps its another problem... I have no idea... I just know that 2 gigs isnt always enough... /k

hmm... could you upload the images here so we (who dont have access to the maxwell forums) also can see them?

wilko - that looks pretty cool. But if youre serious about doing lowpoly people for arch-viz you definetly need a couple of finished textured models to show... the stuff you showed now looks nice, but its hard to know how your characters would look by looking at a textured shotgun also... most 3d-people-models you can buy are around 2000-4000 polys I think... I would much prefer a character with 10.000 polys, a 2000x2000 texturemap that actually looks real. Most of us have pretty decent computer hardware anyways, so a few thousands more polygons wont kill us (just my opinion ofcourse). And Im sick and tired of the axyz people that look like monsters when you get too close. And even though a texturemap can look good, alot depends on the material settings too... so I guess what I would really like to have is a mid-poly character with great highres texturing and different material settings for the skin, the shoes, the clothes etc. That would be cool.