Desert Sanctum

Sup! This is gonna be broken up into two chunks of info so if the technical stuff doesnt interest you too much you dont gotta read about it! :)
Concept: To start I knew i wanted to do some kind of desert temple, but I didnt really want to just go with your normal sandstone abandonded kinda standard you see around. I decided I wanted it to be like, very metal heavy as if the cavern kind of structure its built into was filled with this metal and was used to coat this structure and build all of their items with. As I had that hashed out I then just came up with some basic themes that I thought the temple could fit and worship, so as I knew i wanted it to be a water heavy scene I chose a fish, and because I wanted another motif I chose stars e.t.c. Theres some details in the scene and some lore that I kinda hamfisted in, and its definetely something Id wanna work on more for future scenes. Overall In some ways I feel like i overdid it but in others I really like that and it let me have fun, right till I had to try and actually finish this scene it was a very cathartic chill project just working through each asset and seeing what worked.

Technical: This was started as a test of Cycles X, mainly to see how it handles 4k+ textures. It does alright at it, rn multi gpu support still doesnt seem to be working too well so I cant tell if the in software view was hardstuck on 8gb of vram rather than the 16gb it should have available but thats just the nature of experiemental features rn so there was a decent amount of crashes. At first I was just using the base CyclesX settings, which is crazy fast, but was crashing with some of the 8k textures sometimes, but even on my 3070 this really heavy scene, 5k samples with slight volumetrics was rendering in like 11minutes or something nuts at 2k. Craziest was when they re-added the tiling into it, allowing for me to push the resolution even farther to 5k (these are downscaled for artstation), i didnt even really see too much of a time difference and it was way more stable.

Theres a lot more to say here but I don't wanna overpack this section even more! I hope you enjoy and any feedback would be killer because im already thinking about my next large scale scene :^)