Digital Art Zone

Garstor - 21 June 2012 08:14 PM

Dartanbeck - 21 June 2012 07:22 PM

With my new workstation, the wait is really no longer much of an issue…

My new toys are starting to arrive. Still waiting on the hard drives and cases. Although these machines are for work ultimately, I will do double-duty with Carrara on the 24-core / 64 GB Fire-Breathing Dragon (hopefully I can swap my runtime hard drive in and not have to reinstall everything).

- Quickly wipes up the drool from the floor to prevent others from slipping -
I want! I want!!!!

Although I must say, this Zambezi 8 core sure is a nice render chip!

Dartanbeck - 21 June 2012 08:19 PM

- Quickly wipes up the drool from the floor to prevent others from slipping -
I want! I want!!!!

Although I must say, this Zambezi 8 core sure is a nice render chip!

I’ve been dreaming of this for awhile now… Apologies for the geek-porn. ASUS 2 socket server-grade motherboard with 16 slots for RAM.

The 64 GB machine will be running two SQL Servers as a simulated failover cluster…then on the weekend, I’ll let Carrara loose on it.

Dartanbeck, regarding the fog, have you tried using a volumetric cloud instead? I’ve had terrible results animating the cloud parameters, but decent results rotating the clouds or moving the camera through them. The advantage is that you don’t have the alpha issues that you have with the fog. I don’t know about 8.x.x, but in C7, just about the only thing that doesn’t render if it intersects the clouds is dynamic hair.

Hm. And here I am making a short film using a measily Pentium D dual core.

LIKE A BOSS

Just noticed the smoke talking bit. If it’s of any use the way I create smoke, steam etc is to use particles. I’m sure most people do it this way, but basically you set your particles to zero gravity (or directional if necessary), “add” the scene light as a bulb, set the light to only affect the particles, click over to mesh so that you can see what you’re doing, and then shrink down the bulbs, add a “glow” to the lights and Edit the glow parameters to about 3-5% a piece depending on the thickness. You can also change the color of the bulbs to change the smoke to reflect whatever it might be reflecting, you can add additional bulbs, etc.

I like this method better than volumetric clouds as there’s a lot more life to it. Also if I’m doing Just fog/smoke filling a scene I just use practical smoke in AE.

Oh and you mentioned 3DLust earlier—I’m using Sirius Labs in my short and yeah—it’s a friggin BEAST to render. I’m resorting to just doing PNG sequences with transparent backgrounds for characters and placing them over th pre-rendered lab scenes. Only possible way to use them with my meager set up.

BC Rice - 21 June 2012 09:33 PM

Just noticed the smoke talking bit. If it’s of any use the way I create smoke, steam etc is to use particles.

Interesting! I haven’t had much success with using particles for anything myself (I blame me). I don’t do animation for much the same reason.

BC Rice - 21 June 2012 09:33 PM

Oh and you mentioned 3DLust earlier—I’m using Sirius Labs in my short and yeah—it’s a friggin BEAST to render. I’m resorting to just doing PNG sequences with transparent backgrounds for characters and placing them over th pre-rendered lab scenes.

Are you showing off any WIP somewhere? I’d love to see how this turns out.

As for the lanterns; using EP’s advice, the render time dropped to 1 hour 48 minutes. I’ll see if I can bring that down a bit further without losing the overall effect.

Now off to buy some of Neftis’ on-sale stuff!

Yeah it’s here under “BC’s short film WIP”. Probably on page 2.

Garstor - 21 June 2012 08:17 PM

evilproducer - 21 June 2012 07:36 PM

I’d go post something there right away, before Wendy goes into full-on mourning or decides to make you a tribute video! 

She might even get an Australian National Holiday in his honour!

If it involves consumption of beer, I’m sure the Aussies will go for it.

hey I didn’t start the thread!
(just added the awful poetry that I thought scared him off )
just checked here to see what you guys were saying!
I use 4pixel accuracy for animation btw to stay on topic, takes too long otherwise.