I put my car shot on to render between the 17th and the 21st this month (I’m rendering my tire smoke separately). It is now the 29th… so roughly 8 days worth of render on the farm for this smoke… some of the frames have taken 3 days while others have taken half an hour, I’m sure I’ve done something wrong.
Our IT guy was supposed to install an additional four machines into the farm last week, I’ll give him an email and ask what’s going on…
EDIT: Well now, it turns out the machines that were taking four days were actually OFF. They must have not been able to take the strain. I got into the server room and half the machine’s lights were just dead, switched them all on again and we’re back up to speed. What a waste of time! I still haven’t heard from our IT guy yet.
I finally decided on what to do with this car. I’ve made the side badge into my name, used Craft Director Studio to animate the car doing a wheelspin, and then used Maya fluids to do the smoke. I originally tried using particles and planned to use Krakatoa as the renderer but I just couldn’t get the right motion I was after. So this shot is going to be the opening to my new reel. I haven’t made one in about two years now and it’s high time that I did.
This took about two days of fiddling to get right. Most of the time I would run out RAM and the computer would freak out and crash. Also if you were to cache from the wrong place with the wrong method then you’ll break the cache file as well. I didn’t want to compromise on the fluid resolution (It was only at 100) so I had to use the auto resize feature and I messed that up as well. I thought I knew this stuff!
Auto resizing doesn’t work if you’ve got your threshold at 0. Surprise dumass! So I eventually settled on a threshold value of 0.1 and a margin of about 4 voxels. Finally the thing would resize appropriately and I would NOT end up with a 1.5GB cache file per frame. I’ve got 16 gigs of RAM on this machine and it got filled up so quickly.
Right now I’ve got the render going on the farm and it seems to be coming out quite nicely. Let’s wait and see.
I’m sure the client I’m doing this for will probably never read this; but if you do, you know who you are, and you know I think you’re being ridiculous.
What is it about doing 3D, doing design, that makes a person forget how simple things in life work? Here’s the scenario, there are these groves in an object, not too deep, and at the bottom of the grove is a light surface. Obviously when looking at it from certain angles you won’t see INTO the grove any more and therefore can’t see the light. I then get told “That’s weird, it doesn’t feel right, why can’t I see the light any more ” I feel like I have to explain why you can’t see the sun any more when you turn around.
We’ve also got some volumetric lighting; a simple fog from a spot light. In the first shot this object comes out of this “fog” and reveals itself. In the last shot it runs basically in reverse, away from us. And now the guy is comparing the last frame of the first shot to the last frame of the second shot and asking me why it looks “bright”.
It’s not JUST this guy. He’s a good designer. These examples are just fresh in my mind because of how recent they are. But I find that when it comes to 3D and rendering photo real stuff then suddenly there’s this spacial dissonance in a person’s mind. They make these mental leaps that no one would EVER make on a real set. I bet looking at something with a large depth of field on set you wouldn’t look through the lens and ask that the focus area be wider. It’s called a focus POINT, not a focus AREA. This focal plane moves backwards and forwards parallel to the plane of the camera lens; why on earth would you think that this can be changed? But somehow, when doing a comp, you show a person the focal plane and they suddenly think you can rotate it.
I’ve been doing 3D for close to ten years now. We are acclaimed as miracle workers, magicians. And with this reputation comes an expectation, an expectation that you can break physics. Telling them “no” gets you a sudden look the way a child looks at you when you tell them that the tooth fairy isn’t real. I’m surprised every time. A heated debate ensues and the person is in such shock that you don’t have this ability to do what he’s asking you. Your dog died… WHAT? But how!!? NO!!!
At what point in a person’s career do you get to stop explaining these things? Things that are a fundamental instinct a person has from childhood.
This actually reminds me of an experiment they did with some primates. There is a point in a child’s life where they make a switch in their mind. This is a switch from assuming that everyone has the same knowledge that you do, to realising that other people may possess knowledge that you don’t have. The experiment is fairly simple but the implications are great. You show a child two people, call them John and Susie. John puts an apple in a box and leaves. Susie takes the apple and puts it into a bag. John then returns and the child is asked where John will look for the apple. If the child has passed this developmental stage they will say that John will look in the box where he originally put it, if not then the child knows where the apple really is and assumes that John knows as well.
How this relates to the primates is they have noticed that the primates who can speak sign language express the same sort of pre-developmental social interaction awareness. They never have any questions for us humans that will give them knowledge they obviously don’t have.
So maybe, just maybe, a similar process is happening when a person is not all that experienced in 3D. They are awed by the possibilities and all conventions are thrown out the window. Maybe it comes from working in the 2D design space for so long. I’ve often seen insanely good designers confuse the difference between where a shadow goes and where a reflection goes. See this picture of where things should go:
How this is confused I don’t know. But many times I’ve seen reflections placed where the shadow should be. How does this happen!!?
I’m just tired of having to explain why. It’s a stupid question. Why do you copy the files from your computer to the flash to take them home; won’t they still be on your desktop? Why is it reflecting like that? Why can’t I see it any more when it’s behind something? Why is it bigger when it’s closer? Why can’t you make it move faster over the same distance and time?
There’s another one that frustrates the horse piss out of me! Being told to make something move faster and then being asked why it finishes moving so soon. This is more common nonsense! If a car goes at 100km/h then how far will it go in one hour? Obviously 100kms. And then what happens if the car slows down and travels for another hour? Obviously it won’t go as far. But then moving this simple idea onto a computer screen and all of a sudden it feels like we’re dealing with rocket science. Here’s a little video to demonstrate:
This is usually what a serious conversation between serious adults looks like in my industry. Ask the same person this simple question the guy asked the blonde girl and they’ll answer straight away with no problem. For some reason the moment this idea is transferred to screen they become stupid and you have to remind them that when things move over time their speed determines the distance they travel.
This is all really frustrating but short of looking at the client like an idiot and just saying “no” I’m not really sure what to do about it. I will probably be plagued by these questions over and over for as long as I do 3D.
I don’t know what to chalk it up to; they’re not stupid… But I’ll still find myself mentally facepalming every time.
I dropped my girlfriend off this morning at the airport because she’s being sent down to Cape Town for some sort of emergency in her company. Good for her. I’ve taken the opportunity to do what I’ve been asking IT to do for the last month now. We’ve had two machines down on the farm. One because of some network card issue, and another because of some Java or .Net issue. Not a clue actually. My solution: FORMAT THE BASTARDS!
It can’t be that hard? I’ve been doing this for many years now and to format a machine and start from scratch will always give you the best results and best performance in terms of raw processing power from a machine. I just can’t believe that I have to email, and email, and email, and still nothing get’s done. Our IT guy has had a look at the one machine, tried to install a new driver, shrugged his shoulders and left it. That’s 8 cores down. And the other machine that just needs a wipe, another 8 cores right there. Deadline reports that as roughly 48GHz that I don’t have access to. That’s a lot of power right there. With those two machines up and running I could have my renders done 25% faster. That’s a lot!
I lost my shit a while back already about this IT guy not doing anything. Even CC’d the boss and he told them that they’d better pull up their socks. Yet here I am, at six AM, doing his job.
If I ever run my own company, I won’t let things like this slide.
Seems that I’m a bit of a dumass. Double spaces after a full stop is how I always type. A difficult habit to break. But what happens is that sometimes a word get’s carried over to the next line with a space before it. Not cool!
I’ve recently discovered, quite to my horror, that putting a gamma correct node into the colour of an area light breaks the diffuse pass!
I’m using PMM to create lights and things so I can work in linear. Unfortunately making an Area Light attaches a gamma node to the colour. I had no idea. And my diffuse pass was coming out not too noticeably different. But different enough that when you comp everything together, the whole thing is darker than the master. Took me a couple hours of fiddling to find the problem. I originally thought that I had missed a pass… but I had all the passes I needed so obviously one of them were broken. Gamma node you little shit!!
And thus I have to re-render about three days worth because of this. Too bad I can’t tell it to ONLY render the diffuse pass.
Ah well, the comp of the first shot is looking amazing 🙂
Charl Joubert 