Diffuse Painting Progress

I've been using Zbrush to paint the diffuse texture for the walls. There's a lot of space to cover and I have to zoom in close to make sure micro details are captured. It has been really helpful for me to use photo textures from my library to help me with color since I struggle with color blindness. I use Zapplink to link up with Photoshop and then project the photos and even do some hand painting too. In Photoshop I use layer masks alot, that way it's like I'm painting with photos. I just make a brush stroke where I need different texture materials to show. This technique is fast so allows me to easily get huge amounts of detail so I can worry about the big picture.

Vray

First test render of my scene with Vray. I took about an hour converting the scene from Mental Ray to Vray and quickly fired of a few renders until I got this. Total render time for this frame using just one of maybe 6 different rendering methods was just under two minutes. It's amazing, that same render would've taken MR something like 15-20 minutes at least. Vray could be a game changer for this project of mine, hopefully I can now work without the software getting in the way.

Memory Issues

I've come very far with the bazaar scene. At a certain point a few months ago, I decided to bring in all of my geometry from Zbrush as decimated geometry which renders quickly but adds tens of thousands of polygons to the master 3DS Max file. Sure enough, I maxed out my all of my RAM and can no longer add to the scene. So, as a result, I now am running tests to find the best method of dealing with the problem. The question here is: do I want to use bump maps on low poly geometry or displacement maps. I don't like working with displacement maps alone because they are a pain to generate and take a long time to render. Here's a test render with high lighting and shadow quality settings.