The "Harvest time" diary - Part 3

December 9-10, 1999

City is over now. I'll change the bars on the balustrade only in the final render. BTW, the render time is multiplied by almost 2 (12 hours now) on my portable.Time to start working on the garden.

It is actually made up of two parts : the garden itself and a supporting tower. I work on the tower first. It was envisioned as a monolith of stone with lots of pipes and strange bulges all around. The pipes I got already, from previous pictures, so I start putting pipes on a box. To position them properly, I have the MadPipe macro, made earlier this year. I just can't remember how it works though, but after a few tests it's working again.

After an overnight rendering, here's what I find (picture on the right). The object count hits the roof, though, in the range of 70000. (Retrospective note : it looks horrible, but with no compression and at a larger size it certainly looked better ! More about this later.)

December 11-13, 1999

With the tower done, it's gardening time. The tree will be from the MakeTree macro. I try an already made tree from a previous run of the tree macro, but there is a problem : it's too short when seen from above, and the macro has trouble making trees with long trunks. I modify the macro. After a some fine tuning, I obtain a correct, if not perfect tree. I add a dummy grass patch and launch an overnight render.

The render shows a too dark tree, and there is something wrong with the colours. I work on the grass anyway, using the MakeGrass macros. In a few hours I have a garden. I also add a little stone border made with the MakeWall macro. Now comes the real problem, the colours. The green lights under the top arches are of a nice turquoise tint, but the grass is more yellow, and the two greens don't match, as you can see in the image on the right.

The rendering take too much time now. The memory hit is 75 Mb and parsing is 15 minutes on the portable. From now on, I'll test the pictures on a desktop machine which renders twice faster. I fix the tree colour problem (I have to move a little the overhead light).

But there are very bad news, the pipe tower is wrong and seems out of place. On close-up the detail is nice, and the pipes appearing in the garden are cool. But thumbnails show that the picture is hard to decipher. The pipes don't match with the rest of the buildings, the structure is blurry and dark and massive. It has to go, definitely, which is a heartbreak after having spent so much work on it. I create a lighter structure in the evening, arch-based (see a close-up here). It immediately looks better, and this is a little relief. Note that the render on the right was not anti-aliased.