Project Focus : Slimers by Promotion Studio

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Remember the ‘Slimers’ commercial by Promotion Studios? James Neale talks about the project’s pipeline and Blender’s role in it, how they rebuilt Blender to run on their 64 bit quad-cores machines with 8 gig ram (closed source apps, eat your heart out! ;-) and about trademarked Nickelodeon slime properties. A very cool read.

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    • http://craigsnedeker.blogspot.com/ Craigsnedeker

      This is awesome! I’ve seen this ad on TV BEFORE I saw it on BN.com. It’s sweet!

    • ByronK

      Thanks, this was an excellent article about the pipeline process.

    • Tx_Rx

      Nice article, take my hat off to them getting the fluid design process down.

    • http://inkweaver-review.blogspot.com NathanKP

      Slightly corny ad, but the use of blender is cool, and its awesome that they rebuilt it for the quad core. But come to think of it, I wonder why they couldn’t just raise the thread count to 4 instead of rebuilding?

      NathanKP – Inkweaver Review

    • http://freefactory.org Bassam

      NathanKP: it’s not the renderer threads they’re talking about (I think) but the fluid sim itself.

    • BlenderBoy

      Why doesn’t the fluid sim in 64-bit versions of Blender utilize all cores & RAM? Is there a build on graphicall.org that has this fluid sim fix?

    • MrNoodle

      Let ‘s hope they give the 64 bit 4 core fluid sim to the community!

    • http://mke3.net Matt

      Hi, the multi-core fluid sim already exists, it’s not something we developed. It wasn’t in the released Windows version that we were using though – the point is that we were able to get a new unreleased one compiled including this support, which is something that’s a little difficult to do with closed source!

    • terence

      Great article. I also like the “low-tech” way of doing the shoe tumble. Very interesting.

    • Lars

      On the fluid-sim-built:
      I’ve actually written to James Neal directly after reading the interview about the “giving back” and he answered, quoting

      “Slimers required we build a multicore vers of the fluid sim engine.. that tech has already been available to all Blender users for a while.
      Otherwise we used the standard vanilla version from svn.”

      I felt a bit stupid for asking him to think about “giving back” and now it’s just a special built… From the article I thought they had recoded some parts of the engine and didn’t offer a patch back into the mainstream (which would suck).

      Perhaps it should be cleared up in this newsflash, that they didn’t do that, but simply compiled a built with some more options applied (if I’m not the only one who read the article wrong).

    • http://kajimba.com James

      Hey all
      Yeah, Lars is right, sorry for the confusion.
      We just utilised code that already existed to build a version of Blender specifically to do fluid sims with.
      Once the Quad cores did their work, we had folders and folders of sim calcs which we used in the regular Blender we had on each render node and workstation.

      cheers