Finis' Experiments and Scribbles

[Finis]

Thanks Rayman! Those have possibilities for the free or cheapest versions. Freeware or closer to it would be a better price for me. Kinect or regular cameras (preferred) is probably as cheap as sensors get. I'll look for the free ware one. Maybe Blender can record the motion from the free or cheapest versions and store it as bvh or some popular mocap format. Best to store in a popular format for use in different programs but Blender is the target program so it's good enough to just have Blender animation as storage.

Any more cheap mocap stuff out there?

[Finis]

Blender Cycles will be able use the cpu along with gpu's. You can get pre-release versions of 2.79 and 2.8 with this feature here https://builder.blender.org/download/

This is not a new thing but there is good news. Iray could use any combination of cpu and cuda based gpus at least as long as it has been available in Daz. Cycles could use combinations of gpu's. Previously adding a slow gpu or cpu with a fast card made a render slower not faster. Now adding a slow device doesn't add much speed but often helps rather than hinders. I'd guess that other renderers are ahead of Cycles on this. This development doesn't improve the memory situation. The scene still must fit in the smallest memory of all the devices used.

Here are my speed tests for Cycles. CPU: AMD fx8320, GPU: GTX 1060, GPU GT 640
The test scene is my Glass Waterfall.

Code: Select all

Tile	Hardware	Time
Size
16	640+1060+cpu	1:09.90
16	1060+cpu	1:15.87
256	1060		1:18.36
256	640+1060	1:35.06
16	cpu		4:28.08

256	1060+cpu	4:1.23	Tile size test

Observations

It mostly behaved as intuition would favor which is more hardware equals more speed. Surprising that 640 + 1060 was still slower than just 1060 as in the past. The tile size test confirms what I read. With cpu + gpu use the small tiles preferred by the cpu.

Conclusion

With a very fast cpu this could be beneficial but there is still little speed gained by adding slow devices such as a regular cpu or slow card. I will still leave the cpu out of renders so I can do other things while rendering and use the small card to run the screen so the large one is free to render. The seconds saved per frame could be valuable for an animation.

[RAYMAN]

Your conclusion is correct if you want to use a amaller card with a very good one...its the best thing to do is run the screen etc on the small one and run the program on the big gpu abd use the full memory of the big card!
What gpu plus cpu is concerned..it depends on the app! It depends how its programmed! Thea has a very smart way of splitting....!
BUT gpu rendering isnt the holy grail!
How efficient a program uses the resources!
A very good example is the clever use in Clarisse!
It even detects duplicate poly structures.. and treats them as instances..and all in realtime and cpu!

[Finis]

Yeah, I prefer intelligent and creative solutions to problems. Even better if you can then throw power at it too! Here is a creative solution some Blender folks do for animation: They start two instances of Blender on the computer. One renders frames with the cpu and the other with the gpu.

Claeisse costs a considerable amount of money as do most of the really good CG programs so they aren't options for me or most hobbyists. Us hobbyists will have to wait but the new tech will appear in the cheap or free things later on.

On throwing hardware at rendering ... My 1060 renders about 4x faster than my cpu. Several current cpu's are much faster than mine and then there are high end ones with many cores. I'll bet a $1000 cpu can render as fast as a $1000 gtx 1080 plus it is good for general purpose computing. Still nice to render on the gpu and have the cpu free for other things.

On throwing even more hardware at rendering ... I looked into render farms. Mega money. The cheapest I found (the Copernicus machine in Poland) would cost up to $2700 to render 36000 frames for a 10 minute animation. Two free render farms had secrecy/nda problems (there is none) and Intellectual Property problems (all your stuff "are" belong to them, or rather to everyone).

[RAYMAN]

The problem is I would like to know what kind of things you want to do! It very much depends!
It all depends on the poly count.....what you can fake etc.....! I didnt post very much lately because Im learning how to streamline my 3d work so that I can get the most out of what I have and what I already own! Its not only about software and hardware ..it is in some cases but its all more about workflow.... its about level of detail etc.. etc...!
You can speed up you workflow considerably by baking the lighting and doing things in realtime etc!
Even with the free Blender!!!
This site is good for getting also advice on shaving off tons and tons of rendertime!!!
You just say...what you want to do...not in detail just..... the tech you want to use and achive.....there are tons of solutions!
By the way Clarisse is free for download and personal use... and its one of those.. you learn it now and pay the indie per year fee once you gain money kind of contract.. just like Houdini!
I think you need to get your maths right.. 10 minutes is 600 seconds.. at 30fps thats 18000 frames! A good render engine can do a render every 5 seconds...! Thats doable at home! Its even mor doable if you work like with a program like vue to create your landscapes as backdrops and hdris for enviromental lighting and bake the textures and run the animations almost in realtime!!!!! It works well Ive been through that! The price is feasable too! You can do your final renders inside Blender either with eevee or with cycles or with luxrender..all depending! Get Windows 10 and run Prorender in realtime...! So many free options that do the trick! Even Daz studio itself is an option if you use the right things as backdrops and bake!!!!
Vue has become very cool the past few months because since 2017 you can export everything out of the app...! HDR.... mountains...
trees..... whole scenes into blender... whole painted ecosystems as instances into Blender.....! Wasnt possible 2 Years ago! You should be set with 500$ to get your animes done without an external render farm!

[Finis]

60 fps is 36,000 frames. Happy if I can get that but compromises or sacrifices are often what gets a project done. 30 fps is perfectly good so I'll be happy with that if needed. Eevee or other realtime renderers are probably best for most things I want to do.

You are right, there is a bunch of good software and some is free or cheap. Prorender looks great! I look forward to getting it when I can. It has a Blender add-on too.

Right about using software wisely. You can get a good picture without so much time. I fooled with the Blender pavilion benchmark settings and reduced render time to 1/3 with little loss of quality. And that's just with render settings. Add the good techniques you suggest and a scene like that could be really fast.

For a project with multiple people the rendering could be divided between all participants. Each would render a set of frames.

[Finis]

My first underwater video. These fish are in a customer's pond.

[Finis]

Learning about volumetrics in Blender Cycles.

You can add volumetric nodes to shaders for the world or for a mesh object. Sun lights don't work for the world shader but do with meshes. This scene crashed my gpu driver and then Blender with gpu rendering but worked in cpu mode. Thirteen minutes. A musgrave texture is input to the volumetric scatter and absortion nodes. That gives the whispy effect but much increases render time. I think the homogeneous effect could be better done with a depth pass and post processing. The whispy effect might be better done with the smoke simulation.

Update: It will GPU render with the finished render thing (F12 or the button). It is changing the settings while the viewport is in render mode, and using volumetrics, that crashes in gpu mode. Replaced with image with brighter light.

[bitkar]

I hope to check out AMD pro render for Blender... could be better than cycles. At least for Radeon owners (tho it should maybe work for nvidia, not sure)

[Finis]

I want to try Prorender too. At this time windows 10 is required to use Nvidia gpus. AMD is good at hype but Prorender is certainly more advanced than Cycles. (They are all good at hype of course.) My concern will be how well its add on integrates it with Blender.