Pet Project: Hugo – Base Mesh Turnaround

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Reduced render time by 50% and removed banding on background by using combination of Blender’s 2.79 new features:
– denoising
– preview rather than final sampling
– limited rather than full global illumination
– shadow catcher plate with composited background rather than usual studio floor setup, effectively not generating banding.

Project Showcase

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Blenderella, Advanced Character Modeling Workflow on YouTube!

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Blenderella, Advanced Character Modeling, originally released in 2011 as a training DVD for Blender Institute.

Get the complete tutorial at:
Blender Cloud
Blender Store

Attributions:
Blenderella, Advanced Character Modeling by Blender Foundation (CC-BY-3.0)
Human Reference Photos from 3d.sk (used with permission)

Check out the showcase!

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Monitoring blender cycles render

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We finally moved our rendering pipeline over to cloud providers.

Here was the render setup:

  • 240 frames at 1920×1080 with cycles, split into 20 regions per frame.
  • Total machines: 49
  • Rendered files stored using Google Cloud Storage.

Render result summary:

  • Total time: 5h 45m
  • Average per frame: 1m 26s
  • Average time per frame would be better if “aws” machines performed normally while using free tier instance. More details below.

VM instance provider summary:

bx – IBM Bluemix – 1 month trial ?!

  • Only provided a Kubernetes cluster with 1 worker node in their free trial.
  • Since we required access to many VM instances, integration to render pipeline was postponed for now.

aws – Amazon Web Services – free tier – EC2 instance 750 hours

  • 15x t2.micro
  • 1 core w/ 1Gb ram
  • Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2676 v3
  • Average time per pixel = 12.46 ms
  • @ 0:15 seconds, we can see the CPU taking 9-10 more time than all other providers.

az – Azure – 1 month trial – $250 CAD credit

  • 16x Standard_F1s
  • 1 core w/ 2Gb ram
  • Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2673 v3
  • Average time per pixel = 1.76 ms

gcp – Google Cloud Platform – 1 year trial – $410.24 CAD credit ($300 USD)

  • 16x Custom preemptive instance
  • 1 core w/ 2Gb ram
  • Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU @ 2.30GHz
  • Average time per pixel = 1.38 ms

vgt – Vagrant (free) / Virtualbox (free) running on Windows 10 (not free) – internal cluster

  • 2x Virtualbox VM
  • 4 HT cores w/ 3Gb ram
  • Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz
  • Average time per pixel = 0.86 ms

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