I finally started building the render slaves for my studio. The first dedicated render node I built is based on basic mainstream parts, nothing fancy, but with enough power so that the render node does make sense to be placed in a rack installation.
The basic idea, obviously, was to build as powerful a machine, as possible for the lowest price tag, as possible. Since I’ve been an Intel user since, well forever, I based the machine on a Core i7 860 (Lynnfield) CPU, DDR3 memory and the rest is pretty much optional. But for my purposes, I wan every machine in the studio, to basically follow this idea of having a dedicated hard-drive, preferrably pretty fast, for the OS and a dedicated one for all the offline data. So, each machine, including the render nodes, will host a C: drive with all the software and programs on and a D: drive that’ll be setup to support all the files that we’ll work with. The workstation will have some other HDDs optionally, but these two drives are neccesary in order to rule out variables in the pipeline I’ve been building for a few months now.
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It seems that GPU accelerated rendering has been the hottest topic recently. But why should only the rendering get accelerated on the powerful GPUs?
There are tons of other applications that desperately need acceleration. Simulation for example. Cloth, hair, particles, rigid bodies etc… all need some heavy calculations and are actually quite simple, in comparison to rendering that is. Wouldn’t you prefer your cloth sims to be faster than real-time? Wouldn’t you love to be able to have physically accurate dynamics in your particle simulations? Or better yet, wouldn’t you love to be able to mix all this together in one mighty-powerful framework, all running on our GPUs? I would!
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Have you ever experienced, all of a sudden, Max to stop rendering furry objects? No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, no nothing, it just won’t! Also, another great thing is the shading of the fur. You can setup fancy lights, fancy shadows, nice speculars etc… and then you realise your fur is totally overbrightened from… hell I know?!
I really envy the 3Delight implementation of Shave and a Haircut’s hair/fur geometry and the shaders, they work beautifully and exactly you want (obviously, you wrote the shader so if it wasn’t working the way you wanted, it’d be a huge bug).
Anyways, 3ds Max’s hair and fur is really, really, bad. It’s not even good for low-budget, low-end productions, it’s completely useless. The only thing that might have a chance of pushing it a bit farther was mrPrim rendering. But then again, mental ray is also such a terrible renderer (at least in 3ds Max) and then again, hair and fur is so buggy in Max it isn’t even worth mentioning.
Man I hope Autodesk does something about this issue soon, or everyone will have to move to proprietary solutions for hair and fur stuff. As they’ve been doing forever anyways… *sigh*
The materials are back on-line! I’ve decided to move these downloadable materials here, so that anyone can download and use them as they like! I was quite surprised by the response I got from people around the world when I temporarily took the materials down from my business web site, duber.cz, so here they are in their original form in one, convenient, package:
finalRender Stage-1 material set 02 (requires WinRAR to unpack)
Here are the preview renders of the materials included in the package (Advanced Car Paint, Aniso Metal, Carbon Fibre, Electron, Neon, Sand, Sex Toys, Snow and newly added Gold!)
One last note about usage, all the materials are provided under the Creative Commons licence!
finalRender Stage-1 material set 01 by
loocas duber is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
The materials are back on-line! I’ve decided to move these downloadable materials here, so that anyone can download and use them as they like! I was quite surprised by the response I got from people around the world when I temporarily took the materials down from my business web site, duber.cz, so here they are in their original form in one, convenient, package:
finalRender Stage-1 material set 01 (requires WinRAR to unpack)
Here are the preview renders of the materials included in the package (Black Car Paint, Red Car Paint, Glass, Chrome, Ice, Stainless Steel, Wax and X-Ray)
One last note about usage, all the materials are provided under the Creative Commons licence!
finalRender Stage-1 material set 01 by
loocas duber is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
