Harvester

here's the link to that pic, looks like I cant figure how to post it here.
http://www.geocities.com/fireseal_17/andrew.html [geocities.com]

oh yeah, all my textures are hand painted and then digitally photographed, and I tried my best to map them properly. I am really interested in getting away from the crisp clean lines of digital art, to create something painterly and viscous.

With closer inspection of a test render that just finished, the displace bound set to 5 took all aterfacting out. So I'll slowly reduce that value to find a happy medium between no artefacting and a reasonable render time.

JC, I must agree that I am approaching this project in a less than efficient manner. The scale of my models is astronomical, because I am trying to create a self contained world within a sphere(sphere dimensions are 191, houdini units in all three axis). I then painted a landscape on canvas, photographed and tiled the painting so that it wraps to the inside of the sphere. This creates my“world” inside this I have models in an array of sizes. Heres a shot inside my scene

The problem geometry is the tree-like model with the bumpy surface. I am using displacement layers(sorry for the confusion) and the displacement amount is set to 0.5. The problem with decreasing the size of the whole scene is that I was hoping to have a continuous flyby shot from down below (like the the pic I have posted) all the way to the top of the problematic model where I have a dwelling and character modelled. I knew the scale issues would be a problem when the shadows for my small models (on top of the tree like object) began to be irregular and not show up properly. The solution for this was increasing the over all model size and the shadows were fine.

I have seen a marked improvement when I increased the displace bounds. I understood that increasing the shading quality might help aswell, is that correct?

So my main problem is that at one end of the spectrum, my scene is too big, and at the other end my scene is too small. Editing between shots, and changing the size of the overall scene accordingly between shots is the only way I can see around this. Thanks a ton for the info.

Thanks alot for clarifying that JC.

The model that I have this extreme bump layers attached to looks better under a displace bound of five, yet not entirely perfect yet. Sure the render time has soared through the roof, but Its really important to get this effect. Does anyone else know of anything else I can tweak?