Colored Electron Microscope type Macrophage and Red Blood Cell shot

[kursad]

It seems like I can not post in "Final Art" section so I am posting the image here. The image is pretty much done.

My goal was to create a shot which is fully procedurally from start to finish. So it was a pipeline test for me. The whole thing is fully adjustable - recreatable including the final comp(thanks to proceduralism) and the variations of macrophage type cells etc. The whole thing took couple days. To me, everything went fine except render times. Overall I love everything about Houdini except the render times. The reason I personally am not happy about it because I have been mostly a Modo, Lightwave and Messiah user so these apps have relatively speedy renderers compared to the Houdini`s.

The scene has a single area light with ambient light. The shaders are mix of couple standard Houdini shaders and my own shaders.

Anyways I have been happy with the process and the final look. I am hoping to see render speed optimizations in near future in Houdini.

Edited January 1, 2011 by kursad

[fex]

wow, this looks really organic! like the colors too.

maybe the red blood cell shouldn't have this high frequency noise

for me they should be smoother and more transluzent...

greets

felix

[SreckoM]

What was render time for this resolution?

[kursad]

@fex

I am glad you like the work. Since I had bad render times I did not do much test renders. The blood cells could use less frequency in my view as well.

@SreckoM

The scene had env light, single area light and ray tracing. The blood cells and the macrophages had single scattering SSS(via H11 standard material). I believe that SSS was one of the main reason for the terrible render times. The scene was rendering around 3 hours at 1280x960 with 6x6 sampling

Here is a little bigger version.

Edited January 1, 2011 by kursad

[ikarus]

very pretty!

[jim c]

Looks fantastic! Out of curiousity, how fast does modo render it and how good does it look? I'd be surprised to see it render it that much faster. Maybe you have some settings in mantra that can be tweaked?

[mightcouldb1]

Beauty!

[dynamoanders]

I love it, really nice small details, good lightning and overall a good composition.

Good work!

[Netvudu]

Nice!...but 3 hours, whoa. That´s too much for this render.

[kursad]

Hi

Thanks for the comments.

@jim c

I cannot be sure since I do not have a comparative scene but probably the render time in Modo would not have been more than 10-15 min for this resolution and with amount of detail.

I had 3 shaders pretty much in the scene. 2 of them were made from scratch and the other one(red blood cells) was using the new H11 material. I suspect that the displacement on the H11 material combined with SSS was the main render time killer.

[jim c]

One thing to check, are you using rat files for your textures, displacements, etc? Somewhere I read that converting all these to rat files makes a difference and I found for my renders that this was certainly the case. Once the conversion was done, then it doesn't have to done on the fly by houdini and I found this helped render performance.

[cellchuk]

good one.!

[Matt_K]

Hey kursad,

great looking render!

"To speed up the sss You can dive into to shader, unlock the surface shader model and jump into the surface shader. There look out for the sss part and dive into the 'if1' node, now in the physical sss turn on the optimize secondary rays checkboxes for single and multiscattering."

From this odForce thread.

Hope that helps!

Matt.

[kursad]

Hey kursad,

great looking render!

"To speed up the sss You can dive into to shader, unlock the surface shader model and jump into the surface shader. There look out for the sss part and dive into the 'if1' node, now in the physical sss turn on the optimize secondary rays checkboxes for single and multiscattering."

From this odForce thread.

Hope that helps!

Matt.

Hey Matt_k I am glad that you liked it. And thanks for the tip , that is probably what I need to dig into.