Durian: render farm arrived, logo design, Comicon
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.
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!
“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!
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
@ndy: yeah, you’re right. They had ‘access’ to 600+ cpu’s, while they used 150-240 cpu’s at a time. I’ve updated the text, thanks!
http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/our-renderfarm-and-how-it-works/
if they fall behind schedule they could get the community involved once again by using/creating one of those distributed rendering environments similar to http://www.renderfarm.fi/ but just for Durian
Did you ever think about a sort of community distributed collaborative rendering? Something similar to
Corefarm (http://www.corefarm.org/)?
Ton seems very happy of this new toy ! Congratulations, this looks like a great machine !
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
At least a local render farm should be better for fast test renders. :)
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?).
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.
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!!!!
Have a look here for the results:
http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17181
Some of those designs are AMAZING :)
(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.)
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%.
there were raytracing optimizations and hardware is faster now… but keep in mind… they will use global illumination this time! :o
New Intels for Sintel. Sounds poetic no?
Congratulations! It looks great.
If you are interested in a render-farm for Blender you should read at http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=185164
I want one!
they need to release plans for that farm!
Very nice!
lol Ton make me laugh. he looks like a kid with a new toy xD
If you guys are so concerned if the rendering capacity is sufficient, why not rent the CPU capacity?
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)