Textures are GO!

Hokay! We can render now! I figured out what was causing the Vram to spak out every time we tried to render a scene with more than one character in place.

2 things:
Texture size
Texture location

As fantastic as the ARNE server is for centralizing everything, it can't quite handle being used as a texture cache as well as a computer can by itself. The solution is dragging the project across to the scratch and rendering locally. The trick to making this work is making sure we move any updated files back to ARNE when we're done, and double checking the project settings each time we start up - which we do anyway...

I've resized all the textures down by an average of 50%. In some cases, even more. Now that the computer doesn't have to Unwrap, filter, light, layer and render 4 4096px square textures per character at 2 characters per screen, it can actually render a frame without crashing!

Here's a bit of maths for scale - an average scene before would calculate about 201326592 bytes of information per frame. That's 0.2 gigabytes (200Mb) of data streamed over a network into random access memory for textures only. Not including lighting, shadows, geometry or visibility calculations. All that cache data is processed to make the single .tga file, which is barely 7Mb...

Now, the same looking thing is only 12582912 bytes. That's only 12Mb (0.012gb) of information to play with for a render. Much easier. The only difference is the texture dimensions.

To prove my point, this is what a production render looks like. Ignore the dodgy reflections...

planks in a trench

Pump Ya Full of Texture

Blue's finished texture and bump, can be fiddled with later depending on shots etc.

Bump N Text 01

So as you guys can see the texture I did that bombi slapped on his animation in the earlier post pulls the texture around its neck a bit(im still workin on this).

It may not seem like much but it has alot of work in it. I'm going to go on a rant here...

Ok so first I did the texture and stuff, including an 'army' like pattern on his cloth although when i finished it, it just looked off. Just this morning I deleted the whole pattern and have decided it should be plain orange. Why? Because it draws emphasis off the whole form, there's so much value and shape in his arms then the rest of his body that it just looks ridiculous. This is my opinion but I'm feeling pretty strong about it at the moment.

Also since we are creating 3D, a medium that can look extremely plastic looking at times I first decided to try and give some bump on his fur....which turned out to look like he was made a grass or had just been beaten with a the end of a metal cleaver. So I thought about it and came up with the concept of 'bump noise'. If giving him a bump on his fur looks weird, I would need to imply that his fur is actually smooth and everything else is dirty and gritty. So the concept of 'bump noise' is to break up the shapes of his clothes and helmet (maybe even the environment to some degree) with a very light gritty texture. You can see if on his helmet, and that same texture is applied to everything but his fur.

Also did alot of tweaking with his cloth bump which I think has turned out quite nicely, now all I have to work on is his scratches and bump for helmet and vest. I also changed his eyes to the same green in the concept art cause green goes well with orange(you can see it on a colour wheel).

Thoughts or anything ive missed out on?