Building a large scale environment

kulu · May 24, 2020, 9:25pm

Hi. Ive been building a scene in blender. I plan on using this scene and others as a blueprint for building large scale environments for my games.

All feedback is welcome

Ive kept all models as low poly and workable as possible. I discovered that branched path tracing in cycles work’s really well for lighting. I also used both denoising options which sort of helped me keep rendering samples at 12 , just so I dont sit here waiting for 5 hour render times.

Ive got about 1 500 000 grass objects, and 90 000 trees, both the grass and trees are very low poly. The buildings have interior walls ,doors and skirting, but ive tried keeping them low poly.

As a city it does look a bit wonky , but I think the general vision of it being a city is starting to come through.

Any thoughts are welcome. My pc is low spec (i 3 ) so…yeah.

//Update 2020 08 29 //

Ive attempted a video render of this project. Very low settings as you can see. Im currently working on increasing the render quality for the next update.

I did notice that hdri maps slow down render times. As compared to a sky texture , in the world settings.

Laters

// update 26 09 2020 //

Hi again, ive done another render for this personal project.

I rendered in eevee this time. I’m pretty shocked that eevee managed to render this scene. Before , on a much smaller scene I would get graphical errors, like my gfx ( gr 620 2 gb )at the time was seriously unsuited for eevee. But now on my current intergeated gpu , its rendering an even bigger and more detailed scene with little problem.

But I must mention that this is on the lowest sample settings of 1 sample.

Its rendering at an average of 1 minute per frame, which almost made me loose my potatoe brains.

Will keep updating for anyone interested.

Bye.

// Update 29 09 2020 //

Hi. This is the latest on this scene. It was a bit more tricky to render the Aeriel camera view, but I tried…

Bye.

// Update 25 10 2020 //

And that’s a wrap. Finally done.

Color.pixel · May 24, 2020, 10:23pm

You have a good PC because you can render am move stuff around.
If you see my topics, you find a locomotive es64 the only and that one (plus some wagons and a train station) did not work on a gtx1070 but only on cpu i7 with 16 gigs of RAM. And on that i had Blender crash random after a frame or too. After a bunch of restarts, and laptop in airplay mode and only Blender open i could get 200 frames rendered.

Your scene is very optimized i like it!

Wanna do more? Try making most with textures and no mesh. For instant trees that when look from the top they are in star shape 4 planes intersected, just like in games. They look ok from a distance, but bad from upclose.
Same for grass.

Also use modifiers. It eases up the file, the RAM and the render time. Plus you will see that the pc runs smooth.
For instance I just finished a high detailed bridge only with modifiers and i work in once scene (blend file).
Then i had to append all of it into another project and fkr that i applied all the modifiers and joined all in one object. My Laptop became a potato :)) could not even move in wire frame mode.

kulu · May 25, 2020, 9:03am

Thanks Color.Pixel. My pc is very slow though. I cant enable the everything in the viewport, I must hide everything except what im working on at that time. If I try just to unhide the grass in the viewport, my graphics driver says it has crashed and has recovevered, and then the screen goes into low res 256 colour rainbow. Sometime I think that crashing is slowly killing my gfx card. So I dont unhide the grass I just make it rendereable and hide it in the viewport. If I try eevee in this sceen , I say goodbye to my scene and have to force restart my pc , because it freezes and shows rainbow colours. But since I want to do this for my games , I will try even more simplification. Which reminds me. I used the simplify option for this scene and took subdivisions to 2 , but I’m not sure how simplify option works. But at least it’s there, so I will try it.

Color.pixel · May 25, 2020, 9:50am

Yeah but still you can render. And that is very good. Because maybe one day you will see that you can add stuff, work, make simulations etc, but once you push render and starts to pre-calculate and do magic, before the tiles to appear, your RAM will get to max, and then Blender will be zpufff, gone :))
For me, to be sure i can render, i save a HIRes scene with all the stuff, but i keep the modifiers (never apply them, but stack them). If I can I use Array everywhere is possible. And that one is for render. Same for boolean, i hide from view and render the object used to subtract the parts. This way i get my 30/60/120 fps in Blender and I can render a preview in minutes.
Then i delete most small details and keep only the basics to have a raw model to be put in other projects like a solo object or like i just tried here: