I think that if I added another GPU, it would go from very slightly affected to quite bottlenecked.
There are GTX 1080’s used on ebay for around $400, but unfortunately, for the rest of the drawing process, I need a faster CPU.
My friends does product renders for something you likely have seen. He routinely does 6k renders. I don’t think I got one successful render at 6k of the diner, and no successful ones from on the inside, looking out at 4k, so far. : (
Raytraced can use multiple GPUs, two or more of the same model is a good thing.
I don’t think that the CPU would be much of a limiting factor here, other than handling the callbacks that happen during a session (status update, rendered pixels). Pixel updates are always in tiles, so no whole image in one go (unless you set the TileX and TileY really huge, but that you don’t want to do anyway, since that will be just slow).
Rendering time isn’t that bothersome to me. I need to sleep sometimes. It can render then. I need Rhino to be responsive while I work.
I took some pix of the thunderstorm to make a background for the diner, which started all the fires are here–including the one that’s threatening my friend’s house house, where I have moved some shop things in. It was only a cellphone pic, so I stacked a few more pics to reduce the noise, and used nVidia’s denoise to clean it up a bit.
At least I have a background I can use; the other wasn’t mine. The metal for the diner is still a problem texture because, while the real diners are brushed (sanded) stainless, that texture is below what you can see from a distance given modular transform frequencies, and all of that. So, seeing the grain as a bump is even more difficult because–now you need 3 pixels to show: a shadow, a texture pixel, and a highlight. This is where a texture helps, but if too much is added, then it’s not reflected enough.
I wanted to use Fresnel reflectivity, but I find that there’s not enough reflection amplitude for metal, and also for the insulator on the pole.
I wanted it to look like it had just finished raining.
A friend gave me a list of things that should be added changed. More grit, filth, and dirt was added.
I continue to work on the brushed stainless that has vexed me so. The bumpmap must be high-res–and there needs to be a texture to give it detail where the bumpmap is seen dead on. There isn’t enough resolution–even in a 4k image to give a bright and dark pixel on either side of a bump. Getting the material for the diner and stainless and the tar took me a stupid amount of time.
Leaf dust and garbage were photographed. Contrived lighting was added to bring out the splendor of the utility poles. The supports for the sign were located in the Layer stack. Sentences were cast in the passive voice so there weren’t too many “I” in the description.
Agree with your friend- You definitely improved your renders from the last round. It might need more layers of grunge between objects- between the slats - water drips- smudges on glass etc That said it needs to work for a cover- you probably need to have a darker sunset or night HDR background to bring the diner more into focus. I would also definitely suggest having a wet-map of some sort to get more lively reflections in your composition and asphalt. Is this rendering still intended to be a cover image? Does it need to live with other text?
With at least a half-dozen 4096s, I am pushing texture limits pretty bad. I am going to try to make a 3D wavy driveway, and try filling it in with water. I am not sure if there will be z-fighting or not, but I am going to give it a try.
As they say about engines: there’s no replacement for displacement : )
Or heighfield, as it were.
I rebuilt the driveway adding some puddles. It’s starting to look pretty run-down. The newspaper needs a bit of angle on the pages. There’s a texture alignment seam, which likely cannot be reasonably removed because we have no H/V NURB based mapping.
Nice improvement. What is H/V NURBS based mapping?
Hi Nathan, GTK Radiant had a method of mapping either a portion, a whole, or a number of copies of a texture/shader along the knots and HV seams of a NURBS object. This was hellawhickedly™ powerful. This is how cables, pipes, columns, and semiorganic stuff like intestines were made textured in ID family games. It all only took a few seconds each to map textures on each different object.
An additional cap mode worked like the trimmed surfaces Rhino uses for capped cylinders.
For instance, the telephone pole in the background, I could click on an object, select a texture for it, open the inspector, and just select: natural(mapping), 1(horizontal copies), 4(vertical copies), and click Fit. And I am out of there. It would be no more difficult to do the same to map a texture for a knotted rope. I don’t even need to see a widget in 3D because I know it will be done. Non-integer dimensions would just scale the mapping/texture and give you a non-integer result 2.5 copies.
There was also the ability to map single/multiple copies of a texture on any rectangular surface. The the user could resize by 1D, and the number more texture would be reeled out. This would be just the thing for siding, shingles, wall panels, and almost anything else in many games were textured/mapped. If I made one stainless steel panel, and made it longer, the texture scale/unit would not change. This is a little like the WCS mapping, but it’s per-object, and it locks while rotating and moving the object. Because there’s no free lunch, a bulge or flare would distort the texture. A clipped wedge mapped with that kind of mapping would distort the textures tapered to match the interpolated edges.
To come from a Max/Maya, and perhaps Blender, world, there’s likely nothing to compare it to.
The diner foundation was…interesting. but I did the best I could. Keeping Rhino from making any seams in it might help. There would be many nodes along a straight line, and everything would be a single extruded curve because the result could not be a polysurface, well the face of the bricks anyway.
[I’ve been meaning to make a demo video of it, but I’ve had 2 health issues, other real-life stuff such as the traditional Silicon Valley housing issues, and some of my stuff came 600ft from burning up in a fire, that and orange sky and daily burning eyes, which I hope will be getting better as the fires come under control. Some animal killed/ate a cat in the front yard here, today, in Silicon Valley, so I was busy with that this morning.]
I understand that this diner is quite the rendering shop of horrors, but it’s close to many real diners. There were 2000 of these, now there are 20.
Oddly, my mother used to work in a paper cup factory that made the famous Greek Anthora design cups at Sherri Cup. My boss at ERA Replica Auto also used to work on the owner’s GTP racing cars in the 1990s.
It’s looking good Brenda, a lot of detailed nice touches…
Did you think of trying a TwoPointPerspective camera? (or just removing the vertical distortion in Photoshop or similar 2D software?) In that case you may need to zoom out a bit more so the electric pole is not right at the edge…
Maybe it’s time to throw in some characters and add life to it !?
( here are some random free ones: https://skalgubbar.se/ - not all of them would fit 
)
Sorry to hear about the tough times… Hope all works out and you can still make a demo in future.
Best,
–jarek
Hi Jarek, Yes it needs characters. This will be a thing. Oddly, I want to put real people in front of it, and then shade them to look a little painterly to match. Oddly, I made 3D printed 2 physical pistol hero-props for the cover. The gist of it it will headlights on the 3 characters, 2 pulling pistols, one beckoning the others to wait. IF I can find people who will work out, then I will have to make stencil textures of them to shadow the headlights on the front of the diner.
The corner shot will have distortion. I wanted the diner to be a little larger than life, and there will be a price for that.
I touched up the newspaper boxes a bit, and the newspaper on top.
Can’t wait to see that! I see you already have the plot of what’s going on - that’s the key…
A specular map was added to simulate rain. Work was done on the diner metal, though, I am still not happy with it, and a lot of it depends on the whatever is in the environment map, or dome in this case.
The diner was meant to be comforting yet foreboding.
Beer bottles were added. There are 3 little stories in this render. One is that someone felt ripped off by the charger, and tried to ram it, and other is that someone sat outside and drank while they read a newspaper. The third story was a sad one, unbenounced to me, as I took the background image with my cellphone, the thunderstorm had started a fire that burned much of Santa Cruz county. The CZO fire would spread smoke all through Santa Clara County. Coyotes came down from the hills; pets disappeared.
I added subsurface scattering to the neon, but at that distance it’s difficult to tell. What it needs: a bright inner core, and an outer dim core. All the neon is NURBS!
Schoolhouse lights were swapped out…all in the passive voice : )
Image from CZO fire at Bonnie Doon.
A RTX 4070 can render this to 20,000 passes at 4k, in fewer than 4 hours. The reflections, transparency, and diffuse are all set to 32, all utilizing the Oxford Comma. : )
I’ve done most of what else I wanted to on this, and it’s rendering, now.
I experimented with the fake volumetric lighting for the lights. The image just isn’t dark enough to support it.
This version is 8k (7680 x 4320). The site here has lowered the image sizes down, perhaps i will link the 8k version. I think it used to take 2880x1620’s.
This is machine stats while running. The GPU power varies up to 90 watts. As others have stated elsewhere, because it’s running on Optix’s and RTX cores, it runs cooler, not being on Optix, the GPU power draw is about 150 watts.
For 8K images, 12GB seems okay.
Some more changes:
Hi Brenda,
I find the earlier render with greater glare from the end windows more satisfying in that aspect, although I’d struggle to articulate why, beyond there being greater variation in the scene. Perhaps it feels more appropriate for the time of day.
But I feel the light direction in the clouds is at odds with the foreground. Might it look better if the sky was flipped left to right?
Regards
Jeremy
Here is the latest render. The original is 8k. It took my little RTX 4070 19 hours, 30 minutes, 21 seconds, to render 20,000 samples, no denoise.
Sadly, the bricks are much too large. : (
Fixed. Also increased the stainless reflection a bit, reduced the bump on the curb a bit, added hexagons for the nuts on the pole, perhaps they might gleam a bit. Fifteen minutes of effort; another day of rendering, but not right now.
(It’s seem petty, but sorry scrapers, they are all copyrighted, all rights reserved.)
The following 2 photos are of the Olympia Diner, in Connecticut, another O’Mahoney Diner. I’ve been there : ) Not my pix, though.
You can see how completely different…no wait : )
You know…because it’s all modular, it wouldn’t be impossible to design a reproduction diner, a real one. : )
The corner needs curved glass, though.
3D modeling can be so glamorous, like when I took photos of the trash in towne. : )
I just made a disk for the trash, rebuilt it with some nodes, which I moved around to give the trash some heights. Cups, and bags were added to complete, sort of, the illusion…of trash.
[Ironically, my mother used to work in a factory making the Anthora paper cups shown in the rendering, featured in New York, which were often made in Berlin Connecticut. My supervisor at the GT-40 and sometimes Cobra reproduction car show, also worked on Sherri’s GTP racing Jaguar cars, which was a late 1980s racing class. One day, he held up the hinge bolt for the GT, and said, if I could get this bolt in, I could work on the race-car shop, meaning work on multi-million Dollar race cars, in a shop with a Lexan sheet covered floor. : )
Once, my boss asked me to carry some old MGB fenders he was saving when he used to race his Austin Haley at Limerock. As I carried them, he said, don’t drop them, they were Paul Newman’s. ]
