[Anim] Anello

[Dade]

I have some CPU cycle to spare and I was looking to something challenging to crunch. So I started to work on a little animation project. Given my very limited skill with Blender and Art in general, this is intended more as a technical demo than an artistic work. The main target of my little project is to have a demo animation at high resolution (i.e. 720p) and noise free.

First of all I asked Pinko one of his model (gallery2.php?g2_itemId=1910) and than animated the model in the most trivial way ever thought: a 360 degree rotation

I first started setting the rendering parameters for a preview mode and the result were quite surprising:

It looks really good even by using only directlighting integrator (Metropolis + DirectLighting + 500 samples per pixel). I can render one frame in less than 5 minutes. For reference, this is a MLT/BiDir rendering with 11,000 samples per pixel (it is just perfect, no comment):

I rendered the 250 frame animation preview at 640x360 in less than one hour with 6xQuadcores (various Xeon and Q6600): http://www.vimeo.com/7680722 (BTW, I created a Luxrender group on Vimeo)

The rendering was a bit too fast so I switched to MTL/BiDir at 1280x720 with 1,500 (!) samples per pixel (about 2hours rendering per frame). The Quadcores pack was able to crunch half of the animation in a weekend and I should be able to crunch the next half in the next weekend.

P.S. the script used to render the animation on 6 server is attached to this message.

[jeanphi]

Hi,

Very nice indeed, I like the scene. Too bad there seem to be no dispersion enabled in the diamonds.

Jeanphi

[sandos]

I think there might also be some aliasing in the bottom part, but it is very subtle

[pinko]

Nice animation Dade!!!
Jeanphi ... you are right for diamond material...(i remember still now your suggest) however is a great animation...
ciao
Luca.

[Dade]

Jeanphi ... you are right for diamond material...(i remember still now your suggest) however is a great animation...

I have probably changed the material of all diamonds by mistake: looking at the original scene there are white diamonds in the central raw and dark blue on the sides while all the diamonds look white at the moment.

A good excuse to rerender the frames ... I need only to find the trashcan where they have thrown all the CPUs left from this upgrade: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehCgG9yZ ... r_embedded

[Atom]

Nice attempt, it still has the shadow jumping effect. I have been trying to leverage Lux for animation for a while. I may give your settings a try!

Why did you feel the need for a special script?
Couldn't you just press the Animation button in LuxBlend?

[Heavily Tessellated]

I doubt they would just bin them, I mean come on, it's Cray, there's got to be enough geeks in the I.T. dept that did the upgrade that they fight over them, simply from the standpoint they were Kraken CPUs... assuming they get to keep them. Ah well, it's only money. And AMD probably comp'd both the quads and the sexts just for the bragging rights & free advertising. Can you imagine?

The drooling during the 48 cores per blade upgrade video notwithstanding, that's a sweet little anim for such a short time! Q: Why are your rotation keys ramped on both ends? Is this speed up/slow down by intent?

I wonder what it would look like with the diamond materials fixed, with high dispersion and MLT/bidir to ~5k mutations/pix, and those IPOs fixed to be a steady rotation so you can loop the video indefinitely...

As was said, the shadow thing, also I can't tell if the "snow" on the tabletop material is from low samples or Vimeo's compression artefacts. You said 1280x720, so I'm assuming you posted it to the HD channel too; don't forget to re-link us if (when!) the moderators approve it, this version or the next, 'cause I'm pretty sure you'll go back and re-render a dispersive refraction version. That will cure all your "CPU cycles to spare" problem for a week or so...

[SATtva]

mplayer 12033296.mp4 -loop 0
Hypnotic. @__@

[Dade]

Why did you feel the need for a special script?
Couldn't you just press the Animation button in LuxBlend?

I just share the project directory via NFS and than I can start/stop the anim.py script (any time and how many times I want) on any PC mounting that directory. It is very handy to add/remove/stop/restart servers on the fly.

[Lord Crc]

Nice, however it's noticeable that it's not GI. Tho I understand why