Finis' Experiments and Scribbles

[Finis]

@Pugman Thank you sir.

@Bitkar It gets cold here in Winter. 4400 ft (1341 m) elevation. Not European cold but most years there is a little snow. Mostly too dry for snow even when cold.

@Rayman Everyone says he looks gay. Maybe the complete Jedi outfit and different mocap will look more manly. I've looked at IPI Soft. Not cheap enough for me but it is low priced and does a lot. It used to support only pseudo obsolete sensors but now it can use many cameras and sensors. The sensor systems like XSens are getting cheaper but still not for hobbyists.

Tevu is from this project https://www.united3dartists.com/forum/v ... 1&start=20

Question: How do you all who have done animations organize your files and resources for multiple scenes. Meaning that you will "shoot" several scenes and edit them together to make your movie. Do you use one file (like a .blend) to hold it all? If so, how is that organized? Do you use different files or what?

[RAYMAN]

That is something very important and called asset management!
For someone serious in 3d thats one of the most important things..especially for people who need to make money with 3d!
The most important thing in 3d is to establish libraries! Of materials of shaders of hdri of models...trees !
Thats one of the most important things!!!
Do not throw away things you have created!
This also leads to a second important thing..dont use all to many redersolutions or stagers!!! You need for ever render solution a special Library and assetmanagement..which gets confusing!
The cons outway the benefits! Once you have a workflow..stay with it ..and establish your content management based on that system!
In Blender that is still not final because the new assetmanagement isnt implemented yet into beta! It didnt make it yet on time..its only in a few testbuilds!
The way its handled now..with appending isnt a good or great way!
When you make an animation you can at its best if you use Blender.....let all your resources...work at the same time.....frame for frame..but distributed to your resources ..even older ones..or laptops deprnding on the workload!
When your finisched you cut your files..and do tonemapping on them just like with every film you make!
For cutting try to render out the whole film in a non compressed version..and make compressed variants of it depending on your use! Yes you can save the whole project like any othee but be prepared that loading sometimes isnt easy and fast!
I dont use Blender for cutting..I use Movavi which is 50 Bucks and renders 10x faster! Letting your puter render at full load for hours costs quite some money! But for compositing Blender is a very good option...! It also has a very good tracker!

[Finis]

I tried auctions on Ebay to get a used gtx 1080 ti. The bids always went far beyond my level. So now I'm trying for a used gtx 1070 ti. That's more sane spending for me anyway. No luck yet ... (checks item) approaching my limit. There will be others. Patience. Persistence. I noticed a lot of "to good to be true" prices and prices that were ridiculously high. Much more than the cards cost when new.

Played with Blender 2.8 beta. Many UI improvements. Still a steep learning curve but I think it will be easier to get started with Blender. I discovered that Eevee renders faster if you minimize the window. Watching the frames render it took 2.23 seconds per frame. Minimized window and it was 0.8 seconds per frame. Self shadowing of objects was not present but I have near zero knowledge of Eevee. B2.8 cycles handled multi-gpu plus or minus cpu rendering well and might be a bit faster than B2.79. Before, a slow item plus a faster one could be slower than just the fast one. Now more hardware equals faster.

Update: Eevee self shadowing is present. My lighting was obscuring it.

[bitkar]

renders faster if you minimize the window

oh btw: i saw this in tS too... not about the speed too much, but the memory usage - it drops significantly when you render vray and you minimize tS window. I find it a bit strange.

[Finis]

oh btw: i saw this in tS too...

Don't know about TS. My guess about the Eevee speed is like this: If frame "calculation" takes 200 secs and displaying it takes 1 sec then the "display" time is only 1/201 of the total time. If the calculation takes 1 sec and displaying it takes 1 sec then the display is 1/2 of the total time. Removing the display time makes the fast render twice as fast but is insignificant for the long render. Iray in Daz has a setting for how often the screen image is updated.

[Finis]

I'm disappointed. I got a used gtx 1070 ti from Ebay. Price ok but lower would have been better. Thinking of selling it.

The 1070 ti has twice the cores and runs about the same speed so it is like 2 1060's. I expected the 1070 ti alone to be almost twice as fast as the 1060 and together to approach 3 times. In tests with blender cycles it rendered in 86% of the 1060's time. Both did it in 53%. It is faster but not enough to be worth the money.

Pictures with longer render times benefited more from the 1070 ti and multi-card. Probably the set up time is a large portion of the total with a quick picture. So it is not beneficial for small pictures or animations with frames that render quickly. An animation test took 7 minutes with the 1060 and 6 minutes with both. The frames took only seconds to render so the quick picture effect was there.

Eevee will be good but I wanted more ability with cycles type renders too.

[pugman 1]

Hi Finis, All These hi end Cards like yours are built for gaming .with that 1070ti you can run a high demanding
game with a very high Frame rate maxed out . if you realy want fast renders it Costs .the Quadro Cards are built for
3d work so are the firepro ,These Cards are crap for gaming but very quic for Rendering .i had a firepro ,still have it somewhere
but by gaming ist overheats and is extreemly loud

[Finis]

I'm happier after testing with longer renders of1080x1920 animation and HQ still pictures (when I should have been working, London rocket weeds all over town). Multi card performance improved to 43% of just the 1060 when it counts on these longer ones. Close enough to 33%. In the future, depending on finances, I might sell both cards and get one larger one.

Someday I might try an animation scheme for final renders where I start two instances of Blender each using one card to render a different set of frames.

[RAYMAN]

Finis the render farmer!

[Finis]

The Flowers of Spring challenge reminded me of these.