shangriladida

hey guys...

Ive been idle to this forum for soo long....been in search for myself, and its not suicidal~ hahaha...

ok anyway, I have recently bought a 4GB RAM, a Quadro, Dual Core Duo, and a storage of 500G, I have a goal for this purchase....that is to achieve maxwell rendering in less than 2 weeks, for a maximum of 3 minutes of animation(interior shots)...
Can I achieve this? Its going to be hard....I set this goal to beat this guy who can manage a 3-week of modelling and rendering works(but not with maxwell render). If i can break his record, with such quality that MR can give, plus able to compete the time, Its good for the business right?

I will consider farm render, but how many pc should i set for slave? Assume all pcs are installed with p4 processor, 1GB RAM, and minimum a Geforce4...

One more questions, in order to enhance render speed, does it really depend on the hardwares? Instead of using a p4...we use dual core duo...Instead of using geforce4, we use Quadro....

I have tried render an mxs with my new pc....theyre kinda look fast, needs 4 hours to clear the grains, but it used to be 10 hours from my old pc...boy~

sham
www.shamsulnashriqworks.hatesit.com

AJLynn

Well, you'd be doing animations, which would have a lower res than print shots, so at least that's something. How does this break down...

30 f/s * 180s = 5400 frames
3 week * 7days/week * 24hours/day = 504 hours
5400 frames/504 hours = 10.7 frames/hour > 5.6 minutes/frame, assuming 1 PC

Of course, with Maxwell this is impossible, even with a Core2 Duo, but you can multiply that number of minutes by the number of PCs you have to work with, assuming you come up with a reasonable way to distribute the work and can maintain 100% uptime for 3 weeks (reliable power, good cooling for the PCs and the room they're in, and nothing extraneous installed, and if you can come up with a system to automatically recover when Maxwell crashes that would help because it's going to crash). Figure out what the render time is foor an average frame, throw in a contingency of, say, 10%, and divide by 5.6 minutes to find the number of PCs you need.

shangriladida

5.6 mins for a frame??

u cant even see the details with MR! I am estimating around 5 pcs including mine tho...no idea of location to be assembled, no idea of backup when they crash....no idea at all!

Even a filthy rich guy wudnt want to hand in their money for extra pcs...maxwell render shud think of something by now. Dumb but rich people now days are looking forward to effort, therefore, they want animation....still shots are impressive, but for the dumb, they dont care....evendo we care!

AJLynn

What do you mean? It wouldn't matter what render engine you're using - to do 3 minutes of 30fps animation in 3 weeks on 1 PC gives you 5.6 minutes per frame, in any software. There are a lot of frames involved. This is why ILM has a 1500 node farm.

With 5 PCs you's have 25 minutes per frame. This might actually work. Assuming you can set up the scenes and lighting to give you the fastest possible render times. Though you might decide you need to lose some frame rate. What's the goal here? DVDs?

TheAllusionist

How do you plan to render an animation in Maxwell, last time I used it, it did not support animation, is there a big 'News Break' I am un-aware of? I guess you could do a lighting study animation in it, but it wouldn't be a fly around unless I am completely clueless on the matter and missing something. Just curious, I am sure you know what you are doing, I just wondered how you were doing an animation in Maxwell?

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AJLynn

It would have to be frame by frame, and put together at the end. Maxer's done it, using a ton of PCs and not anywhere near the number of frames you're talking about.

Actually, what you might consider is developing a style that's a mix of full animation with "Ken Burns Effect".

TheAllusionist

Yes, but doing it frame by frame by minutely moving the camera yourself for each one would be like doing a still hand drawn rendering with an Etch-A-Sketch! But the 'Burns' style of zooming in and panning on hi-resolution renderings could work I feel better, Next Limit didn't release a new version of Maxwell behind my back! LOL

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manta

No no no, all you do is choose Maxwell as your render engine, set the time to say 5 minutes and hit render, all your animation is done by the host program, Max, Maya, C4D or whatever you're using...

And ya, Maxer was using 80 computers to do his animation, you might be alittle short with just one...here's his thread...

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/18889-...animation.html

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Maxer

Ok, the chances of rendering out an interior animation that is 3 minutes long in 2 weeks with one computer is zero. Basically you need to reach a SL of 16 before the interior frames are clear enough to pass for animation work, even then there is still some noise but it's acceptable. This is an example of a 1 minute animation I did in a 3 week period of time using about 80 machines, it was only rendered at night which gave me about 15 hours per night and each frame took about 6 or 7 hours depending on the computer.

http://www.divshare.com/download/43870-806

This one took about 3 months and is about 3 minutes long; it didn't actually take 3 months to render so I'd guess that the actual render time every night for 15 hours came out to be about 30 days.

http://www.divshare.com/download/35537-545

Even if you can get the render times down to a couple of hours which isn't going to happen you are still going to have to deal with the fact that you are going to loose frames while you are rendering. Most of the time this is a result of the server application crashing or the computer will encounter a problem which hangs it up. That means that you will be re-rendering those frames that don't finish which could be anywhere from a few to 20 or 30. Now exterior images render much faster than interiors, there about 10 times faster because you don't have to deal with all those indirect bounces. Interiors on the other hand are extremely slow and if you’re using glass or plastics your times will go up even more because it takes longer for the noise to clear.

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AJLynn

That's very nice. But would you say it was worth the effort to Maxwell it? Instead of using some renderer that lets you save lighting solutions?