902 replies to this topic

[C3POwen]

7347 Highway Pickup (Model A) [Creator, 2012]



MPD file

For those wondering on render times for an image like this, with complex transparent parts (windscreens, light bricks) and the use of radiosity, the render time at 3200x1800 was... wait for it... 8 hours 31 minutes and 37 seconds.

Test renders were, of course, much quicker, as they were rendered at a low resolution with fast, low-quality radiosity settings.

[Palathadric]

C3POwen, on 24 June 2012 - 08:42 PM, said:

For those wondering on render times for an image like this, with complex transparent parts (windscreens, light bricks) and the use of radiosity, the render time at 3200x1800 was... wait for it... 8 hours 31 minutes and 37 seconds.

I promptly died on the spot when reading this. Just to let you guys know, I'm almost done working on the Castle sets and will render them as time permits.

[C3POwen]

Palathadric, on 24 June 2012 - 09:03 PM, said:

I promptly died on the spot when reading this.

To be fair, I have used a tweaked version of POV-Ray's Radiosity_Final setting, which is set to create images of slightly higher quality than the default version included.

Also, the 8+ hours is rare for most of the renders I do, with 1-3 hours being more common.

See it as a warning for anyone wishing to render anything with a lot of transparency!

[Blakbird]

C3POwen, on 24 June 2012 - 08:42 PM, said:

For those wondering on render times for an image like this, with complex transparent parts (windscreens, light bricks) and the use of radiosity, the render time at 3200x1800 was... wait for it... 8 hours 31 minutes and 37 seconds.

Test renders were, of course, much quicker, as they were rendered at a low resolution with fast, low-quality radiosity settings.

I know that you don't use the anti-aliasing built into POV-Ray which of course means that you have 4 times the pixels to render. Personally, I do use anti-aliasing since I have found that it is a lot better since Koyan first wrote his tutorial. Nevertheless, one of my "standard" renders at 1600x1200 with radiosity and HDR usually takes about 4-5 hours on Mega-POV or 2 hours on POV-Ray 3.7 using multiple cores. I'm using an i7 chip with 4 cores.

Just for reference, my personal record is this render which ran continuously for 48 days. It has over 100 light sources and particle fog covering the entire ground.
http://www.brickshel...ry.cgi?f=387260

[hrontos]

Blakbird, on 24 June 2012 - 10:28 PM, said:

I know that you don't use the anti-aliasing built into POV-Ray which of course means that you have 4 times the pixels to render.

This may look like 4 times more pixels, but the default POV-Ray antialiasing uses 3x3 neighbouring pixels (can be more if you want). So it actually spawns extra rays for those 9 pixels to do the antialiasing and resulting time might be longer than using higher resolution without antialiasing. I think, speed of rendering using antialiasing actually strongly depends on how much antialising is really necessary, since POV-Ray is doing this extra tracing just when it detects a pixel that needs the antialiasing according to specified AA treshold. In case of higher resolution render without antialiasing POV-Ray has to do more even if not necessary.

Edited by hrontos, 24 June 2012 - 10:46 PM.

[C3POwen]

Blakbird, on 24 June 2012 - 10:28 PM, said:

Just for reference, my personal record is this render which ran continuously for 48 days.

Now that's some render time!

Blakbird, on 24 June 2012 - 10:28 PM, said:

I'm using an i7 chip with 4 cores.

I'm using a slightly less fast Core i5 750, running at 2.67 GHz, so would be interested to know which flavour of i7 that you're using.

hrontos, on 24 June 2012 - 10:45 PM, said:

I think, speed of rendering using antialiasing actually strongly depends on how much antialising is really necessary, since POV-Ray is doing this extra tracing just when it detects a pixel that needs the antialiasing according to specified AA threshold. In case of higher resolution render without antialiasing POV-Ray has to do more even if not necessary.

That's an interesting point. I guess that large flat areas without much in the way of reflection would perhaps not benefit from worrying too much about how well POV-Ray can antialias.

I still find that complex transparent parts (essentially the corners of windscreens or anything with lots of studs) can slow things down a lot, as I found with this old render. The transparent red wings took forever.

Would you recommend using different AA settings? Perhaps AA 0.0 for better quality, rather than 0.3?

[hrontos]

C3POwen, on 25 June 2012 - 06:11 PM, said:

That's an interesting point. I guess that large flat areas without much in the way of reflection would perhaps not benefit from worrying too much about how well POV-Ray can antialias.

I still find that complex transparent parts (essentially the corners of windscreens or anything with lots of studs) can slow things down a lot, as I found with this old render. The transparent red wings took forever.

Would you recommend using different AA settings? Perhaps AA 0.0 for better quality, rather than 0.3?

Specifing 0.0 or 0.1 instead of 0.3 can improve the edges of the bricks or other areas with high contrast where aliasing typically appears and should be removed. Sometimes 0.3 still leaves these edges a bit aliased. 0.0 is doing antialiasing on every pixel, so it can really make render long running and there is no direct ratio between AA level - 0.1 sometimes does not take only 3 times longer than 0.3. The transparent parts still look odd even with 0.0. Especially small parts with many edges close to each other like 1x1 round plate or other typical small transparent parts. It looks like POV-Ray makes some pixels much brighter then the neigbouring ones (probably due to many reflections within the part itself).

I personally think, that some reflective rays hit the same pixel many times and it makes him brighter - this does not occur when rendering in higher resolution since the same group of rays hit the same area, but on high-res the same area consist of 4 or more pixels, so they are not so oddly bright and resizing averages them with others even a bit more. The resize approach seems to produce better result on these transparent parts.

And one nice benefit is that you can select resized size according to quality of "antialiasing" produced by resizing. So if you are not satisfied with 50% reduced size, you can resize it to 33% without starting the render again from begining. Output will be of course smaller, but after a few hours of waiting it is still better than to start again due to a bad looking aliased picture.

[Palathadric]

And with the new version of SR 3D Builder came a host of new LDraw parts.   Now I will have to go back and re-render all of those sets.

[chipster007]

4993 COOL CONVERTIBLE - LEGO CREATOR

BOOK 1

Hi, my first set made with SR3D
[Image]

no error
Included the l3b file to play with animations

Attached Files

•  voiture.zip   9.3K   1 downloads

Edited by Calabar, 27 June 2012 - 06:20 PM.
Oversized image converted in text link (maximum size allowed is 800x600)

[C3POwen]

10020 Santa Fe Super Chief [Trains, 2002]



MPD file (not all submodels shown, but included in file)

Errors:
- Missing stickers

[C3POwen]

The rest of this year's MMMBs released so far, after I'd posted 40044 Lawnmower. I've left them in model number order, rather than release order.

40036 Cobra [Monthly Mini Model Build, January 2012]



LDR file

40037 Hockey Player [Monthly Mini Model Build, February 2012]



LDR file

40038 Worm & Earth [Monthly Mini Model Build, March 2012]



LDR file

40039 Tulip [Monthly Mini Model Build, May 2012]



LDR file

40040 Olympic Flame [Monthly Mini Model Build, July 2012]



LDR file

40043 Duck [Monthly Mini Model Build, April 2012]



LDR file

Edited by C3POwen, 07 July 2012 - 04:54 PM.

[Palathadric]

Finally getting to work on re-adding the .L3B files to the pirate sets. Working...

[C3POwen]

8815 Speedway Bandit [Technic, 1991]



LDR file

[C3POwen]

7292 Propeller Adventures (Model A) [Creator, 2012]



MPD file

Parts with rotation axes:
- Front wheels and wheel locks
- Propellers

And the corresponding mini model...

30180 Aircraft [Creator, 2012]



LDR file

EDIT: Added mini model.

Edited by C3POwen, 15 July 2012 - 04:55 PM.

[Holodoc]

I just have to post in here now.

I'm following this topic for quite a while and I have to say I enjoy every single digital creation.
The models look so much better than the ones built with LDD.

Thanks to all of you for sharing your work here!

[C3POwen]

5867 Super Speedster (Model C) [Creator, 2010]



LDR file

Holodoc, on 12 July 2012 - 06:57 PM, said:

I just have to post in here now.

I'm following this topic for quite a while and I have to say I enjoy every single digital creation.
The models look so much better than the ones built with LDD.

Thanks to all of you for sharing your work here!

Glad you're enjoying all the effort everyone on this thread is putting in! Progress can be a little slower than LDD, as LDD auto-snaps pieces into place, but I much prefer the rendered results using LDraw to POV-Ray.

Of course, hrontos has released his LDD to POV-Ray converter, which produces good results too.

EDIT: Spelling.

Edited by C3POwen, 12 July 2012 - 10:03 PM.

[C3POwen]

Another red model for today...

7944 Fire Hovercraft [City, 2007]



MPD file (not all submodels shown, but included in file)

Parts with rotation axes:
- Front cannons can be tilted up and down.
- Front engines attached to underside wheels can be rotated left and right.

Errors:
- Missing stickers / correct printing

[Palathadric]

So sorry fellows. One computer I had been using crashed and more recently the one I had LDraw installed on and all the LDraw models just crashed three times in a row. Both of them seem to be hardware failures. Trying to get the latter back up and running, but it's a slow and tedious process. Apparently the former owners of the computers were not very gentle with their equipment.
Thankfully, however, I managed to backup most of the LDraw models, however I cannot install SR 3D Builder anywhere at present. Hopefully, that will change soon. Models are still coming. I'm almost done with the Castle sets and also have done most of the Pirates 2009 already and the Islander sets too. Just need to add the minifigs.
Thanks for your understanding.

[C3POwen]

7346 Seaside House (Model A) [Creator, 2012]



MPD file

Errors:
- Missing correct printing

Edited by C3POwen, 11 August 2012 - 07:25 PM.

[C3POwen]

5891 Apple Tree House (Model A) [Creator, 2010]



MPD file

[C3POwen]

20014 4x4 Dynamo [Creator, 2010]



LDR file

[C3POwen]

I noticed that there are no models in the thread index from the Tiny Turbos subtheme, so thought I'd get the ball rolling. I have quite a few of the Tiny Turbos already built, so will try and post them in batches.

4947 Yellow Sports Car [Tiny Turbos, 2006]



LDR file

4948 Red Racer [Tiny Turbos, 2006]



LDR file

4949 Blue Buggy [Tiny Turbos, 2006]



LDR file

Edited by C3POwen, 27 July 2012 - 04:41 PM.

[legolijntje]

I'm back vacation now, and what a nice models were added, C3POwen  
I think I have to update the index soon...

Holodoc, on 12 July 2012 - 06:57 PM, said:

I just have to post in here now.

I'm following this topic for quite a while and I have to say I enjoy every single digital creation.
The models look so much better than the ones built with LDD.

Thanks to all of you for sharing your work here!

I have to agree that models look way better with LDraw.

Edited by legolijntje, 28 July 2012 - 05:53 PM.

[C3POwen]

7452 Le Mans [Tiny Turbos, 2007]



LDR file

7453 Off Road [Tiny Turbos, 2007]



LDR file

legolijntje, on 28 July 2012 - 05:52 PM, said:

I think I have to update the index soon...

Have you thought about splitting the index up into subthemes? It might make it easier for people to find what they're looking for.

A good example would be the City theme. There are 15+ subthemes, and it'd be nice to have the models split up a bit more. And the Pirates list at the beginning of the thread could certainly do with splitting up when/if the 2009-10 sets are added.

It's just a suggestion, though, as I know it would create extra work when it comes to maintaining the index.

[C3POwen]

7611 Police Car [Tiny Turbos, 2008]



LDR file

7612 Muscle Car [Tiny Turbos, 2008]



LDR file

7613 Track Racer [Tiny Turbos, 2008]



LDR file