Topic: Township Branding

[BMcIsaac]

This is a model of the entrance to a small town in northern Ontario. I have removed the signage and the banners making ready for a new banner theme and a video billboard to replace the yellow sign in the streetview shot. Bearing in mind the animated board is going to require some thought. In the end it will become a drive-by of the sign with local ads running....30-50 seconds should do it. The video is to show off the sign and the location to prospective ad buyers.
I'll be sure to drag you through the process...

[Littlemeister]

Grass on Lumion (the "3d grass) Looks to Cartoonish popping when compared to both the real picture and in Lumion picture itself to pop out.

[BMcIsaac]

Thanks guys. Funny thing...I oversaturated the shot to match the photo after looking at them together...I have added the original below .... it has a road texture applied in PS which I have removed for the movie. (second shot below)
The terrain is a combination of Lumion and SU mesh so the lumion terrain for now has a stock texture...the grass is always fun depending on the shots. When it comes time to shoot I identify the areas in-camera and try to replace them with a more random type of grass texture by drawing the patch on the surface of the mesh so it can be painted or a higher resolution image can be added.

You will also notice I have taken the kinks and bumps out of the road mesh by moving the bumpy verticies up and down on their axis.

The last image shows the unpainted and the painted so you compare.

This method works well with a big project model. You need to keep the ground plane intact so that roads can be painted in or cut in quickly. The second below is a shot of the road with some painting, sand, dirt, pavement grain and tire stains. This is so the movie version looks a bit more realistic of course. The ground plane image is about 6000x4000 so you can push the resolution more...maybe Morten will tell me what the max resolution is for the full plane...

[Morten]

The ground plane image is about 6000x4000 so you can push the resolution more...maybe Morten will tell me what the max resolution is for the full plane...

That depends on your graphics card. The latest cards usually support texture resolutions up to 8192x8192 pixels.

Just make sure that Low memory mode is not enabled in the Settings. Otherwise textures on imported models will be capped at 2048x2048 pixels.

[BMcIsaac]

But you are saying you have no threshold at which time the image is compressed...before it is mapped? You do at lower resolution.
I have now pushed it to 14000x7000. Both PS and Lumion are happy...doesn't seem to be any lag at all. The file save time in PS is about 6 seconds.

What I am trying to understand is how far I can go with resolution....If I go now to 20,000x will I get still better detail. If you look at the image below you can see the original painting on the 6000X image....I pushed to 14000 and added the white line....and the new  darker road is not painted it is now a texture...the white line is sharper and there is more pavement detail to work with.

There are many short cuts that I can use the ground plain for. I want to  know if that 14000 image was scrunched in Lumion??...and if so, what size is optimum in Lumion.

[Morten]

Lumion will only cap the maximum texture size at 2048x2048 pixels if you turn on Low memory mode in the Settings menu.

However, if that's turned off, the only limitation is your graphics card (and DirectX).

As an example, I've just loaded a 16,384 x 16,384 texture in Lumion on my ATI Radeon HD 5850 card, and it worked fine (although it did take ages to load it ). I didn't try rendering anything though, so I wonder how it would cope.

Which graphics card have you got?

[BMcIsaac]

 I have a GForce GTX 260 and that is small compared to some but I made some mods.
The box is an older Gateway FX with twin bays. Insted of adding another 260 I put a water cooling jacket in the second bay and directed it at the card. The second thing was disc handling. I raised the "Windows Experience Index" to 7.2 with better disc handling. 7500 to 10000
I don't have the instruments to measure the overclock but I get more consistent behavior and Lumion/SU and PS seem to reside with each other constantly sometimes multiple versions of each in the workflow. I have two Samsungs running at 1600x1200 as well.
Lumion is pretty slick...I guess by now you can tell I'm impressed.

[BMcIsaac]

A video clip

approx. 9 seconds a frame, total 1 hour 22 min. 

[stucki]

most impressive. !!
great details !

[Remko]

most impressive. !!
great details !

Very good indeed!

[BMcIsaac]

Thanks stucki, Remko...that is an 8000 pixel mat.
I'm working with a 20,000 pixel wide mat now..adding decals for debree...dirst..dust...finegrass. I'll post it when it is ready.

[Remko]

Lumion won't handle textures this big but you can split the model in parts and apply several smaller textures.

[BMcIsaac]

OK...I was trying to understand that...I'm sorry I need to ask....what does it handle??..can you describe somehow?

Here is more detail...

[Morten]

OK...I was trying to understand that...I'm sorry I need to ask....what does it handle??

As I mentioned above, this depends on your graphics card. The upper limits for graphics cards running a DirectX application are based on power-of-two resolutions:

1,024 x 1,024 (Graphics cards that are too old for Lumion)
2,048 x 2,048
4,096 x 4,096
8,192 x 8,192
16,384 x 16,384 (My aging ATI Radeon HD 5850)

So all you need to do is to create a 8,192 x 8,192 and a 16,384 x 16,384 texture and try to apply them to a plane in an empty scene. If there's a clear improvement in the pixel density ratio after you switch from the 8,192 x 8,192 texture to the 16,384 x 16,384 texture, it means that it works

[BMcIsaac]

OK thanks very much Morten!!