Open Sourcing

Pretty cool effect for just a few minutes! I'm pretty simplistic in my desktops, so this fits very nicely.

I did a more thorough test on yadra last night and got some nice results. Instead of using a small animation as I did a few days ago, I used a 156 frame scene from the Creature Factory DVD (the scene of the creature walking out of the doorway). Here are the times for rendering on each machine separately:

Optiplex: 2hrs 8min 29sec
Latitude: 3hrs 27min 16sec
HP: 1hr 0min 12sec

I was a little surprised at how fast the vista machine was. I've done a lot to it to make it more streamlined, but nothing hardware wise.

Next was trying out all three together. The time was...drum roll please...36min 23sec. I was pretty happy with that! Adding those two extra computers nearly cut the rendering time in half. This should be a huge help when rendering out the final animation for the house that I'm modelling.

Speaking of that house, I figured out why the shadows weren't quite right, there were no shadows! The default lamp in blender doesn't cast shadows, so I just switched to a sun lamp or a spot and everything looks much more realistic. I'll get some pictures up next week hopefully.

The house model is coming along slowly, but I hope to do some more work to it on the plane during my business trip today and tomorrow. I have added a screen material to the porch, along with a possible wood panelling for the walls.

This second one is a bit dark, but I just sort of threw a lamp in there. I don't think that the shadows are quite right on the floor, so I'll have to look into proper shadows on an image texture.

I have also been playing around with the network rendering program YADRA. What yadra basically does is take multiple networked computers and render an animation using all of them, instead of just one. You can see the advantages because while one computer is working on one image, another can be working on a different image, so it should definitely reduce rendering time for larger animations.

As of right now I have three computers at home networked together, an old laptop that I used in college, my old desktop computer from work that I use for music, and my current laptop that I travel with. The specs for the machines are as follows:

1 x Dell Optiplex GX270, 2.8GHz Pentium 4, 1gb RAM, Windows XP

1 x Dell Latitude D600, 1.6GHz Pentium M, 512mb RAM, Linux Fedora 9

1 x HP Pavilion DV6000, 2GHz Centrino Duo, 2gb RAM, Windows Vista

I used my Gingerbread Man animation for a quick render test on each machine and got the following times:

Optiplex: 1 min 26 sec

Latitude: 2 min 8 sec

HP: 44 sec

Theoretically with all three networked together and rendering the same file the overall time would be less than all of those, however I didn't expect that with such a small quick animation. The computers still have to transfer the files back and forth, which takes up some time. On a larger animation you wouldn't notice this time as much, but I expected something a little slower than 44 seconds on this file. I ran all three computers and was rewarded with a time of 54 seconds.

This isn't too bad and was about what I expected. The frame distribution was as follows:

Optiplex: 13 frames

Latitude: 12 frames

HP: 15 frames

It makes sense that the fastest computer (also the master in my case) rendered the most frames. I am going to try a larger scale test later this week by rendering a part of the creature factory DVD trailer. I'll hopefully see a bigger performance increase with all three computers running.

You can actually see the doors in this last one along with the door with windows in it in the far corner of the room leading to another bedroom.

The next step is to make a couple of sliding glass doors and finish up all the windows. I also have to add the rafters that can be seen over head in the living room and one bed room. It's coming along though!

Now that the modelling is completely finished (minus some windows and a couple of sliding doors) I figured I would take a stab at doing some materials. I took a look at some of the materials on the Blender Material Repository and fooled around with some settings. This is sort of the first time I've done any real material work for realistic things, so it's a bit of a trial and error process. I think the wood materials came out pretty good actually.

The floor itself is a bit older in the house and I like the older rustic look, but I couldn't seem to get that in my recreation, so a fairly new floor will have to do!

I also attempted to do a bit of head design work for a member of the Blender Artists Forums, but the head didn't really match the body too much. Take a look.