Hasta La Motion!

I’ve been doing pro VFX for about 7 years now and the nature of my projects in TV and film are just screaming at me to buckle down and get some more juice behind my simulations and renders, and finally start setting up a file server/license server and a render farm.

The problem I keep running into is that I don’t have as much knowledge with hardware as I do when it comes to being an artist. I have tried to ask on multiple forums and I am either told "it’s too complex" or it turns into a pissing match between tech geeks trying to outdo each other instead of providing any decent info.

First off, my main OS is Mac, and my machine quadruple boots into OS X 10.5, 10.6, Windows 7, and Linux. My main 3D package is Maya, and even though to date 99% of my projects were done with Mental Ray, I have just started using RenderMan Studio. I also do a lot of video and audio/music work, hence the Mac, so I use massive amounts of data for an individual who owns a small company.

After doing my own research on and off, it definitely seems that building servers from scratch is the most cost effective, money:power. But when it comes to hardware there are so many options that I never have had to deal with since I use Mac hardware and have been for the last 15 years or so.

Since this is a long question, preliminary info would be nice on setting up a file server from scratch or from my existing machines, and also for beginning a render farm. I am leaning towards linux for the farm because of stability and the fact that it’s supported by all the 3D apps I use. However, a dual-boot farm might make more sense since I can’t render after effects files on linux.

The hardware I already have at my disposal besides my workstation is:

1) PowerPC G5 Mac (last of the powerpc generation) with dual proc (4-core I believe), 32GB of RAM and a Quadro card. maybe 2 TB of internal drives in it.

2) PowerPC G5 maybe 2-3 years older with 16GB of RAM and maybe 1 TB of drives

3) a really old G4 (one of the dark blue ones) that I haven’t even fired up in years. so that’s probably too old to do anything.

I was thinking of getting a dirt cheap computer as a license server, like a Mac mini, and then possibly converting one of the older Macs to a file server that runs OS X or Linux, and use maybe an 8-bay external RAID chassis loaded with 2TB SATA drives.

I would also need a very good router with NAT capabilities and a built in Firewall.

For a render farm, the bladed server approach seems to be ideal as it’s more compact, uses less power and costs less than turnkey servers. Without a stack of cash to load it up though, I might have to start with a single blade and then keep adding to it when projects come in.

Anyway, there’s the general idea and some things I think might be useful. Any info will be appreciated from those of you who know more about this stuff.

Hey everyone… I was wondering if I could get some opinions/help on a new computer setup. I’ve got a desktop right now but it’s pretty outdated and isn’t up and running currently, and rather than fixing it, I’m thinking about getting an entirely new setup.

I haven’t been keeping up too much with current hardware as much as I used to but looked into it a bit and have a little list of what I’d possibly be getting. As far as what I do on it is concerned, I work primarily in Maya, Nuke, and Photoshop. I’m graduating from Full Sail University in a couple weeks as a compositor (reel will be up soon :)) and all I have to work off of at home currently is my mac book pro.

Price range is probably around a couple grand… I’m sitting at 1500 with what I’ve got listed so far and thats without a video card and power supply.

So anyways, heres the list, any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂

OS: Windows 7 Pro 64bit

Monitors: Clicky. Not positive on the monitors yet, I’ll be bouncing around between different ones and physically checking them out.

HDD: Clicky. I was thinking about getting this or a similar solid state drive for the OS and apps and current projects, and I have a few 7200 rpm sata drives for data. Seems like it might be a good idea?

CPU: Clicky. Flexible on this but checking out the current i7 processors this one seemed like a good choice without spending a gazillion dollars.

Mobo: Clicky. I’ve gone with gigabyte before and haven’t had a problem with them so this is the one that seemed pretty good out of the gigabyte 1366 boards.

Ram: Clicky. Gotten OCZ memory before as well and haven’t had a problem with it. 8 gigs for now, but should be able to get more later. I read something on the Reaper X and not being able to have the sticks side by side, but this one shouldn’t have that problem.

Case: Clicky. This is the case I currently own. Got it way back, but seems like it should be fine? I haven’t done any overclocking and not currently really planning on it, not sure if I’ll need some other cooling options.

Video Card: Clicky. Checked out some stuff on video cards and this one seems like it would be pretty good. But I’m really not sure what to get… Not sure about the best video card setup for performance and price…

And for power supplies, also not really sure, I had a random xclio psu before, and wouldn’t mind getting a modular one this time around for easier organization.

Thanks in advance!

:confused:

Before I get into details, to summarize in 1 sentence: I created a 3D environment in Nuke, boujou tracked and completed the first shot, I now need to import a boujou camera for the 2nd shot needed the same environment but that camera I input requires a new ground plane, throwing my environment off. This is the first time I do a 3D projection in Nuke and need some help, please!

Details:

I have over 5 different shots which are in the same environment, so I tracked 1 shot in boujou, imported to nuke, and built my environment using 3D projections all in Nuke with 3D geometry, etc, it took 2 days just to build. The first shot is rendered and approved by the client and looks great!

I thought it would be a matter of replacing the back plate, importing the new camera, etc. I even gave my separate layers from my matte painting extra room so when the camera pans, etc, thinking it would all work.

However . . .

I then tracked the 2nd shot in boujou, imported the new plate and camera into Nuke, and something is wrong!!! I did not see this coming!

The new camera has a different z position, and the ground plane is at a different height. If I offset my ground plane I already set, I ruin my environment because everything will be thrown off, all the 3D rocks and other things I build laying on the ground plane, I cant do this, there must be a work around.

Is there a way that I dont have to realign the ground plane and everything? I have over 5 shots, and this is due very pronto! :rip:

I think if I can shift the boujou camera so its at the same position as the first frame as the camera when I first built the scene it should work? How can I offset the cameras position without affecting its keyframes if thats the fix. If that does fix it, what about the ground plane? I see that shot 2’s ground plane should be significantly higher than the shot 1 I built the scene on.

Please help!!!!!! Im really stuck at this point. Thanks.

Attached is a picture of the 2 different boujou cameras, the one in green represents this new one which is way too close as you see which requires a different ground plane position where the actors sit on, and the other one is from the last shot which is 100% good.

What is going on, and what do I do!!! Is it as bad as I think? If so I better go to work. Thanks.

Oh and by the way, this is the first time I’ve done 3D projections in Nuke, so sorry if I dont understand fully if it is a simple fix or Im overthinking something.

:confused:

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Hit a wall in a current project and hope someone can offer a quick fix.

We’re using renderman (RMS) and our programmer wrote a ray marching shader to make our particles look like dust with blobbies. Unfortunately there is a bug in RMS and we don’t have the time to write a few plug-ins to get around it and still meet the deadline.

While rendering with renderman would be ideal, we can use Mental ray or maya software since the dust is blowing across a surface. So we wouldn’t need to calculate displacments, just render the dust and catch soft shadows on the base geo.

Right now we have 20 separate particle simulations to show different kinds of movement in the dust. We were planning on exporting these as RIB, and then having renderman load them all in at rendertime and apply the shader. Since we can’t do that now, we need an alternate method for creating the dust look from our 20 simulations.

I was thinking of maybe going old school and using sprites, but I would need to somehow pass the PP color info for each particle to the sprite so I could tint it. The particles are inheriting color at birth from an image and need to have that specific color. Sprites would also render very fast, even though we’d need to create a single image or animation of the dust for the sprites, we could do more tests and tweaks because of render speed.

We considered using maya fluids, but they render very slow, and we would need to connect our particles and try and color the voxels based on particle color which may be more tricky for 20 simulations and quite time consuming to tweak and render.

At any rate, any info would be highly appreciated. We have about 12 days to meet the deadline and are open to any and all suggestions to get this done.

Thanks

Hi all,

Does anybody know the use of the second input of the FLGlow 3 Macro which can be found here: http://www.creativecrash.com/shake/d…ects/c/flglow3

Best, Michael