[Time limited free] World Machine very high resolution generation

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[note : i’m not sure this is in the right section as it isn’t an asset but a service, but i felt it was less weird here than in collaboration (definately doesn’t follow the template) or commercial world, so i’ll understand if this gets moved and am sorry if this is the wrong section but i honestly don’t know what the right section is!]

Hello there,

I just started renting a decent (12 threads 64GB ram 2XSSD in raid 0) windows 2K12 server and it’s time to stress test it. I’m currently renting it to see if it will be enough or not for my own world machine rendering needs or if i need to go wild and shell out the few grands for a “real big” server. The more complex your graph the merrier :slight_smile:
So i’m offering an “almost” free service, all i’m asking for in exchange for generating your world machine files at whatever (within reason) resolution is the right to keep the files for learning purpose (i’d love to see how yall do your world machine graphs as i’ve seen some nice terrains from the community).
Also note that while it may be possible for you to do tiled renders on your side, the advantage of having that much ram swap available is that you can render at the same resolution non tiled, meaning you get artifact less terrain (none of the by tile blending applies there, a 32K terrain will look the same as a 4K, just a lot more detailed, while in tiled they may end up looking very diferent)

All you need to do is to PM me with:

  • Target build specs, if not tiled, resolution which extent, if tiled indicate so also say how many by how many tiles
  • A link to (dropbox only! If you don’t have an account get one it’s free) world machine file
  • A link to whatever world machine macro i may need to download additionally
  • You need to make your world machine file outputs target c:\wmrender\ (by default they use your my documents but end up hardcoded in the file, which means i must manually rename them, make sure to do a low res test render and make sure anything you need does get generated to c:\wmrender before sending, because all you’re getting is a zip of my c:\wmrender folder when it’s done)
  • Make sure your files are in the latest beta format as it’s what i have installed.

Note that you can go wild with the resolution, for exemple i have no issues generating “simple” graphs at 128K resolution, so even complex graphs are just fine at 16K or 32K.

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Well, trying to brute force VM rendering speed by HW is not that wise. Far better aprroach is to “bake” some results and render only some changes. Rendering speed is up to 100x higher, you dont need that strong HW and it is almost no difference in workflow. I was rendering our scenes on 4CPU 16cores and even thou it was taking for example 10 hours. Than I changed approach, I can render even on worstation 10x faster.

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I’m a bit confused by what you mean by bake, if you mean to generate once and then use the output as input for refined, well, you still need to generate once.
Personally that doesn’t fit my workflow when composing complex graphs as i make changes all the way from the start to the end of the workflow permanently, changes that wouldn’t be possible to do on anything except the original first node.
Also the issue with resolution isn’t CPU speed but ram, once you go to high res and end up using more than you have, things slow down to a crawl, i’m trying to generate a 250Km by 250Km world, so i need to generate it at very high resolution for it to be splitable in tiled usable heightmaps without using tiled rendering.