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Durian: render farm arrived, logo design, Comicon

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The Durian team is doing a GREAT job at keeping everyone informed through their blog! So good, in fact that it's impossible to keep up with them ;-) Here's an overview of some recent interesting news.

Sintel at the Comicon

David Revoy will be talking at the Comicon conference in Napels, Italy on the 2nd of May 30th of April at 7pm in the 3DNA Room.

Logo / identity design

The third call for community participation: the Durian team has asked for a Sintel logo design. The winner will get a prominent credit, a free Blender Conference ticket and 3 nights in a good hotel in Amsterdam.

I can't decide if this means that the Durian team is actively trying to involve the Blender community more, or if they're simply behind schedule. I guess I'll have to pay the Blender Institute a visit and find out!

The Renderfarm arrived!

Durian will be rendering the movie on-site on their own renderfarm (16 intel i7-930 nodes with 6 GB each). As previous movies were rendered on *HUGE* farms (600+ servers, using 150-240 at a time), I cannot help but wonder if this will make it in time!

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

24 Comments

  1. "As previous movies were rendered on *HUGE* farms (500+ servers), I cannot help but wonder if this will make it in time!"

    Not only, you have increased the resolution to 4K and the project is more complexe.

    What was the average rendertime in the previous project?

    All the best Durian Team!

  2. Go Durians!

    Bart: I can't remember the exact numbers, but on both BBB and ED, there were about up to 100 clients running one one job. none of the farms had "500+" iirc. more like 100-250. and very rarely were all of them rendering at once. Of course, Campbell and Tony know more about this biz.

    the nodes look way more powerful this time, and having it in-house (with a system that's understandable) is a big plus!

    blendNmix: ED: approx. 15 mins per frame and client. BBB: 7 mins for easy shots, 90 for the headache ones :)

    .andy

  3. i was kinda surprised when i knew that the movie was going to long only 11mins. i was expecting something longer.

    but i didnt know the hard work needed, hope we can see it soon

  4. Welcome to the world of limited resources! :D

    Look like there'll be some optimising happening then, granted the raytrace optimisations and the code updates which have been phenomenal, will go someway to ease the pain.

    Would love to commit some cpus but we're jammed solid here.

    Out of curiosity, how many cores all in then?
    (incl workstations?).

  5. tyrant monkey on

    Cloud computing seems all the rage these days weren't the any offers this time around to render it using a cloud. I know Sun got a bit of mileage from BBB with their cloud system, it was mentioned on an episode of BBC's Click. I would think another company would want to do the same.

    p.s I was wondering the same thing about the logo are they behind schedule. Why not just get David to design one.

  6. i wouldn worry about servers... when i changed my core2 computer with i7, rendertimes with yafaray were suddenly from 3-5min to 30secs, dont forget new machines got faster bus and RAMs, so it's much more powerfull overall...

    keep up good work!!!!

  7. (11 minutes) * (60 second/1 minute) = 660 seconds
    (660 seconds)*(24 frames/1 second) = 15,840 frames
    (15,840 frames)*(1 hour render time/1 frame) = 15,840 render hours
    (15,840 render hours) * (1 day/24 hours) = 660 render days
    (660 render days) / (16 nodes) = 27.5 days per node

    If my math and reasoning are correct, it will take 27.5 days of rendering to complete the project. (The 1 hour/1 frame figure came from some render test times posted on the Durian blog and since that was before the render farm arrived, it could be less, now.)

  8. N.Y.Blenderator on

    Weren't there some tremendous core rendering optimizations somewhere around 2.49? Def after BBB was complete. I recall reading (on this site) increases of near 100%.

  9. there were raytracing optimizations and hardware is faster now... but keep in mind... they will use global illumination this time! :o

  10. I rendered the first shot of big buck bunny at 2560*1440 on a i7 hyperthreaded quadcore mac with 8gb, and I had a render speed of 10 miniutes per frame. With those computers, it is safe to say they could get approximantly 15 frames per ten miniutes. Not only that, but they can use their workstation computers to render as well so I am not too worried. (they could always send a blend file to me and I could render some frames as well, XD)

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