Things have been chugging on slowly but steadily this past week, and there have been some technical problems which have required a rethink on how to approach certain aspects.

I’m still figuring out how to best leverage V-Ray for interior renders, especially with additional lights, and this in turn also poses an issue of exposure - that is, many of the renders I’ve done so far have come out rather dark (I’m aware exposure is a thing, and yes I’ve looked into it), however I’ve yet to figure out (or search for) a way around this that doesn’t cause a huge technical challenge. What do I mean by “technical challenge”? Well, my desktop set-up is reasonable - liquid cooled 6th Gen i7-K, fan-cooled MSi 1070 GTX 8GB, 64GB DDR4 3000MHz RAM, PSU etc all up to spec. I knew there was I reason why I had doubled the amount of RAM in the machine over Xmas, and I discovered the “why” when I attempted to do a 16k, then 14k, then 12k render of the 1:50 section: I ran out of RAM. Why was I attempting such a hugh render? Well, to print an A0 at around 300DPI, you would need at least a render of 14000 pixels x 9900 pixels at 72DPI - which is then sized down (pixel density increases, thus DPI increases). My hope to generate a usable shadow-map, with bump-maps, for the 1:50 has hit a bit of a snag. I’m pretty certain that the real limiter was the number of textures - and size - that were in use, despite using mip-mapping, it kept hitting the RAM limit. Number of lights used was just impacting the render time as far as I could tell (although it did increase the memory usage due to the light cache). All is not lost however, as I’ve compromised and for now at least, fudged the texturing/rendering background, so it is at least something that is kind of fun, if not wholly realistic right now. Ultimately, I will probably have to go back to more traditional methods of texturing - I can already hear Illustrator swearing blind at me.

The wall is a little less sparse - front elevation, and two 1:200 sections are at least relatively presentable, and the stacked plan axonometric w/ programme schedule is on its way (even if I kinda screwed up the toilets on one floor, and have a gaping hole where the M&E service room & EPS are located).

Next up - to plan/sketch out the technical exploded axonometric (which will need to be information dense, yet smart, to fit on an A1); along with additional programmatic massing/enviro/anything I’ve missed diagrams, mappings, visualisations and the city panorama/aerial (already have a couple of photos in mind to use as a backdrop for that).

Am I on track? Eh… I’ll never be happy until I’ve got everything to the required standard, and submitted. Even then I probably won’t be happy until I’ve confirmed I’ve at least hit the bare minimum grade i’m hoping for (not expecting a miraculous grade this year, just want to get this to a respectable level). Even then, I probably won’t be happy until I’ve got my portfolio updated, and sent off to prospective employers, hopefully leading to securing a job. Yes, that terrifying spectre of the real world is showing it’s face once again! OoooOOOooooOOOOooooooh. …