Reducing 3,500 to 29
Back from the Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis, I’ve taken a stab at making my final set of selects from the numerous compositions I generated last week.
After the last post, I went in and tweaked a couple of parameter ranges and how the noisy terrain was rendered and generated another 3,500 compositions, which you can see here:
+ See it super large on Flickr.
After the computer churned these out, I spent a few hours looking through them and managed to cull the set down to an even 350. But as I mentioned before, the next step was to render these using Sunflow, which I did right before I left for Minneapolis. Rendering the 350 images at 1280×1280 with no anti-aliasing and a very low sample setting took about 29 or so hours on a quad-core Intel PC. I had it dumping the output into a Dropbox folder so I could check on the progress on my phone during my trip.
Tonight, I took the next step and chose a final set of 29 images that are contenders for the final render. In that render, the visual noise will fall away considerably, and I’ll be generating a 2850×2850 image suitable for a 300dpi CD cover print.
You can see the 29 images I picked in this Flickr set. As of right now, these are my five favorite renders:
