I'm on my lunchbreak from todays work... here's some thoughts and thangs on production...
Was getting random crashes with my gigabyte 4870 card... found the fix here applied fix now tis fine...
Had my first challenging shot yesterday... 10 second shot took me 4.5 hours to do... mostly because I was trying to use pivot objects in place of nulls to move a walk cycled character AND later I found out thats not what the pivot object is for ^ ^ but yeh...
Renders are still really far behind... I've probably animated about 50 shots now but only 3 shots have finished rendering so far... I'm going out of the country for Christmas/New Years for 3 weeks so I'll leave the renders on then and hopefully they will catch up cause I keep stacking them shots!
Oh yeh Ricky about FK on the arms... I chose FK because when using IK its really hard to control the position of the elbow... you have to also animate the arms solver to get things right and it just makes a mess and still never gives you nice arcs like FK does... thankfully cactus dans tools have an IK/FK switch which makes it a seamless switch even while animating between IK/FK... also with IK you tend to get this floaty arm look that I dont like at all...
Oh yeh I was able to optimize my renders a little bit after I learned about the shadow "Bias abs" setting... on a few of my lights it was set at like .359 which was taking forever to process...I switched them all to 2.0 and it sped them up a lot... its a setting that controls how far a shadow is projected from the object that is casting the shadow... it only needs to be really low when working with extreme CU's or at small scales...
I must say pre-lighting the sets was a HUGE timesaver now that I'm in production...
ALSO stupid ME forgot that I can't use texture channels set to "alias" or "circle" for animation cause like they flicker... looks fine for stills BUT...so I had to go through all the assets and make the switch to MIP
So yeh I'm not too worried about the slow renders....if worse comes to worse I'll like try to raise money to buy more render nodes ^ ^ THE FUTURE IS an animator having an app he can distribute that works like folding@home or the Seti thang so you all could help me render the films... it is possible now... its just that the bandwidth isn't there to send all these huge textures and giant files back and forth right now.... if I was in South Korea or Japan it might be possible locally as they have SUPER fast connections but here in the U.S. our technical innovation is handcuffed by the greedy media conglomerates... SHET I'm in SILICON VALLEY?!?!? Shouldn't I have the fastest interneTS in the world?!
But yeh... aight back to work.
Was getting random crashes with my gigabyte 4870 card... found the fix here applied fix now tis fine...
Had my first challenging shot yesterday... 10 second shot took me 4.5 hours to do... mostly because I was trying to use pivot objects in place of nulls to move a walk cycled character AND later I found out thats not what the pivot object is for ^ ^ but yeh...
Renders are still really far behind... I've probably animated about 50 shots now but only 3 shots have finished rendering so far... I'm going out of the country for Christmas/New Years for 3 weeks so I'll leave the renders on then and hopefully they will catch up cause I keep stacking them shots!
Oh yeh Ricky about FK on the arms... I chose FK because when using IK its really hard to control the position of the elbow... you have to also animate the arms solver to get things right and it just makes a mess and still never gives you nice arcs like FK does... thankfully cactus dans tools have an IK/FK switch which makes it a seamless switch even while animating between IK/FK... also with IK you tend to get this floaty arm look that I dont like at all...
Oh yeh I was able to optimize my renders a little bit after I learned about the shadow "Bias abs" setting... on a few of my lights it was set at like .359 which was taking forever to process...I switched them all to 2.0 and it sped them up a lot... its a setting that controls how far a shadow is projected from the object that is casting the shadow... it only needs to be really low when working with extreme CU's or at small scales...
I must say pre-lighting the sets was a HUGE timesaver now that I'm in production...
ALSO stupid ME forgot that I can't use texture channels set to "alias" or "circle" for animation cause like they flicker... looks fine for stills BUT...so I had to go through all the assets and make the switch to MIP
So yeh I'm not too worried about the slow renders....if worse comes to worse I'll like try to raise money to buy more render nodes ^ ^ THE FUTURE IS an animator having an app he can distribute that works like folding@home or the Seti thang so you all could help me render the films... it is possible now... its just that the bandwidth isn't there to send all these huge textures and giant files back and forth right now.... if I was in South Korea or Japan it might be possible locally as they have SUPER fast connections but here in the U.S. our technical innovation is handcuffed by the greedy media conglomerates... SHET I'm in SILICON VALLEY?!?!? Shouldn't I have the fastest interneTS in the world?!
But yeh... aight back to work.
Silicon Valley - I'll tell you what Silicon Valley does. They lay-off 100 people, people with upwards of 45 years with the company - loyal people, who's only wish was to work and get paid and have health insurance - they lay these people off NOT because business is bad, but because they THINK it MIGHT be bad next year. That's what Silicon valley does. That's what happened at my company today. I got to watch my friends lose their jobs today. So, you know what I say? FUCK SILICON VALLEY. FUCK CORPORATE AMERICA. FUCK THE GREED-DRIVEN MACHINE.
ReplyDelete@Cathy: we can get as mad about it as we want but if we do nothing then it's worth nothing really.
ReplyDelete@MDoTS
So your gonna leave your computer's rendering during your break?! Isn't there a chance that they might over-heat or die or something being on that long?
Also if you don't mind me asking
how many computers do you have anyway?