This week, I finished modeling the detailed temple interior and begun to set up and optimize our lighting.  It turns out that VRay, our chosen render engine, doesn’t like rooms that are half a kilometer tall…. More on that later!

Temple Detail Modeling

• Summary: I finished modeling out the detail for the interior of the temple.  I’ve made heavy use of instancing wherever possible to cut down on the filesize, and optimized all meshes as much as possible while retaining detail.  Some minor additions to the scene are left, like small bits of debris scattered around, but they’ll be easy to implement.
• Positives: This is the first environment that we’ve fully detailed.  It’s a huge milestone for us.
• Negatives: Still got a lot of ground to cover, but we’re making great progress.
• Hours: 20

Temple Lighting / Rendering

[see above image]

• Summary: I’ve got a nice first-pass at the lighting implemented.  It took a lot longer than I thought it would due to some problems with VRay, but now it’s working like a charm!  I’m really excited to add shader and texture detail to this scene.
• Positives: I got the troubleshooting out of the way today, so it should be smooth sailing from here on out.
• Negatives: Oh my god, the troubleshooting.  So VRay doesn’t work with environments of this scale very well, at least not with default settings.  When I first tried rendering lighting tests, any amount of raytracing would cause VRay to lock up.  After tweaking some clipping values and dialing in a few other fancy sounding settings, I was able to coax VRay into rendering full-quality images with surprisingly low render times!
• Hours: 6

UPCOMING TASKS

1. Continue rendering, detailing, texturing, and generally working on the Temple.