Throwing ridiculous amounts of CPU at pointless amounts of detail.
I’ve played around with procedural terrain generation software for quite awhile now, you use a node-based editor, plug things into one another, change settings: and hope / play around with it until it looks good.
Now,
this usually take quite awhile to render out (Exponentially as you increase the resolution of the output files), I played with 1024^2, and 2048^2; but I wanted REAL detail.
So I launched a server, and rendered out a 7×7 tile render, each tile being 4096^2.
This took 23.3333 hours to render, and it spit out the tiles (That totaled in 6gb).
I had to manually assemble them in photo-shop (An easy job); but PS ate my ram, I worked the whole time with my back against the wall, 1gb of ram left before my PC would switch to SWAP exclusively.
Finally, I had assembled my parts, now to save it.
I go for TIFF, File size exceeded 4 GB.
Ok, PSD, File size exceeded 2 GB.
ok…
PNG, started up, and is taking an hour to save.
What do I hope to do with these massive files ?
I have no clue, I don’t do pre-rendered CG: so that’s out of the question, I do games. And I don’t think any game engine can handle this size of file. But, I can still sample it down, which means I get much better control of the scale of the landscape I try to create: I can make it a huge skybox, then snip a little area out with my detailed version (game-play area).
I’ll see.
Oh wait, I still need to make the albedo.