This week has been nuts. Without getting too geeky, I’ve been rendering my face off for the last two weeks straight and I finally see the end in sight.
But for those that are technically interested, I’m running 3d Studio MAX 7 with Brazil 1.2.55 as my rendering engine. Both work really well together and Brazil is very nicely integrated within MAX. Brazil has an amazingly fast Global Illumination solution and some higly optimized material pipelines. I’m also using Rhino3d to mesh my models into polygons as I’m thankfully getting fully built STEP models from Solidworks. Rhino is an excellent modelling package but I’m mainly just using it as a mesher. I managed to upgrade my displays from a pair of 20″ Dell UltraSharp 2001FP to one bad ass 24″ wide screen Dell - UltraSharp 2405FPW. It’s freaking sweet.
The scenes I’m rendering aren’t particulary complicated in terms of geometry (a typical scene has around 200k polys) but it’s been the materials that have been making me stay until 10pm every night. Almost everything is transparent or even worse, partially transparent in places and fully opaque in others. And of course, everything has to look real pretty. There’s no animations here thank god, just a huge number of really high resolution images output at 3000x2250 pixels.
I’m not at liberty to say what project I’m working on, but I can say that if I have to render another slightly transparent vessel holding coloured liquids again, I’ll eat my optical mouse.
The best part of the experience so far has been the extensive use of a remote rendering service I know of down in Alabama. Who would have thought that in the heart of the south in a super advanced remote render farm housing over 700 processors or about 3.3THz (yup thats Terahertz) for anyone to jump on and use. It’s basically a huge warehouse full of hundreds of PCs and tons of air conditioning. Amazingly enough I can control all this power through a very simple web interface, effectively multiplying my ability to produce rendering many times over. A quick shout out to the boys at Respower, “What up Early!”.
And what’s the best soundtrack for global illumination? Public Enemy, natch.
