Tidying things up…

Once everything had been pieced together and the island was finished I made the mistake of…hitting the number ‘7’ which displayed on the screen a polygon count of over 800,000! Whoah! Perhaps a few too many polygons. It also equated to a moderately slow rendering time, I decided something had to be done about this.

In terms of the polygon count the main offenders were the engines holding the harbours up, the initial solution was to reduce the number of engines from 6 on each platform down to 4. This did reduce the count, but not by much. My second attempt was to reduce the polygons within the engines themselves, I went to the original file and removed some of the tiny detail, which were turbo-smoothed rivets, removed the overall mesh-smooth modifier and this drastically cut the count. When the island was re-assembled utilising these new reduced engines the polygon count now read just over 400,000, although still quite high, considering the amount of things present this felt more acceptable. 

As a secondary solution to lowering the rendering time I decided to remove the reflective windows from the buildings. I had noted previously that as soon as the renderer got to any part with windows it slowed down to a crawl, in order to avoid this it seemed prudent to remove the raytrace giving the renderer somewhat less work to do when rendering out the buildings. A further reason to remove the raytrace reflection was the fact that from the wrong angle it could look terrible, on occasion the reflection could pick up the wall of the house and give the visual illusion of being a clear window and that you could see the inner side of the house, which was what was desired to be avoided in the first place. While doing this I did try and prune some further polygons from the buildings as well, just to alleviate that polygon count a little more. 

A dramatic pan of the island:

 

The island mid construction, placing each building was actually rather enjoyable, this entire file was like a massive toy box and I was just playing around seeing what went where the best.

No engines on the chains...how do the harbours stay there? and is that a floating red road?

The polygon increasing offending articles, these engines looked good but too much detail just killed any machines ability to render them.

The grasslands and park where the enormous turbines overlook the (perhaps slighter more up market) housing area.

Once everything was in place it was actually quite breathtaking to behold...800,000 how did I manage that...