Just finished this piece, as a demo for a video game company in Prague. I didn't quite make the cut but, never the less I was quite happy with it. Here's the stats; Low poly count around 100 000 for the entire scene, (mostly the trees) 15 min render time with displacement and 5 min without, 18 hours to start to finish. I used some heavy Photo-Shop work to give it a painterly look, and finish the image quickly. Setting up a perfect render can be very time consuming, so it's better to fill in the blanks with PS. I would maybe use few levels of filters if I was animating it. If it was a video game level I would bake the textures onto the model. Either way, this is just a 2nd level concept, or background. I was given a rough pencil drawing as reference, so this is not my design.
The biggest challenge of this project was the palm trees! I had no model even close to a decent palm tree and the default 3D Max model sucked (they are the stringy models early in the set). I made a new dynamic palm tree model the same way I made my other trees, I'm quite happy with it, and gained a new tree for my library. I did have a better vision for the volumetric light and fog depth, but , it became overworked very easily and was eating up too much time, I found it detracted from the focus of the image so, in the end I almost eliminated it almost entirely.
In hindsight I feel the project could have been completed allot sooner, in maybe 8 hrs, without making a new tree, screwing around with volumetrics, and the issue I had with my networked render system. For the future I would like re-model the scene into an Aztec type ruins, who knows. It would be nice to decide on one scene and bake all the textures and render a short little film, but which one? I have so many.
