Only 46 hours left to go!
Boojum the brown bunny
Posts: 348
Only 46 hours left to go on my render! *giggle* I MAY have overdone the details a bit. Lots of grass... Lots of fur... Lots of depth of focus getting rendered. But I can hardly contain myself! Right now I have 3 machines rendering... my main i7 system with 8 cores, then 2 quad core systems for another 8 cores. 16 cores total. And it still has another 46 hours to go according to the progress bar after running all night!
Boojum the brown bunny
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Wow... what a tease! That looks like it's going to be a really cool render!
The brown bunny dances around in a happy bunny circle! "It's going to be so beautiful! Frost, a character I play in an AD&D 2nd edition game, got bit by a bunnygoyle and is going to become a bunnygoyle himself! He's got stripey fur all over, made using Dynamic Hair in Carrara. In the game, the weather is currently a steady drizzle and the group is camping in an old barn. So I darkened all the colors in the scene to make them look wet.
I'm going to add the rain in post production by using the old layers trick. You make three layers... The picture, the rain layer, and the picture again. So the rain layer is sandwiched between the two picture layers. You then take a barely working, feathered eraser of fairly large size and begin erasing the top layer. Where you wipe, rain starts to show through. This is great for adding the little flurry of raindops that shows up in a camera shot. You have to be careful not to overdo it, however. The out of focus area's of the picture you won't see any rain at all, just a bit of mist. The rain you will only see in the in focus part of the shot.
Boojum the brown bunny
May I ask, since you're doing postwork on the image, why not render a depth pass and use that to create a DOF in Photoshop? Is the Carrara DOF the raytraced DOF or the post-render DOF effect?
I'm using Photoshop Elements. Will Elements do lens blur with a depth map? I have run across a lot of things that Elements won't do that the full photoshop will.
Right now I am rendering with a rendered depth of focus. I paused the render last night and tossed another two machines onto my renderfarm to, hopefully, speed things up a little bit.
Boojum
Wow. 2nd Edition was (is) a great system! I used to paint and sculpt dragons and dames for a local D&D newsletter back in High School. Never new what the game was about until I went wandering the Earth as a young adult. What fun! The population where I live is really tiny. No D&D gamers that I know about. So Neverwinter Nights has grown to be my way of virtual tabletop roleplaying online. And making character images for my NWN avatars is what got me started, somewhat indirectly, into all of this 3d stuff! Thanks D&D!
I can't wait to see your character!
*laugh* Well, the AD&D 2nd edition game I'm playing in started out as an AD&D 1st edition game! This game has been running pretty much every saturday for decades in our GM's own ever growing and changing custom world of Gaea. It is a lot of fun being able to play a game where the rules don't completely change every other year, resulting in the destruction of our characters. Frost, the character I'm rendering, is currently being played in our gaming forums. My character in the live saturday game right now is a 14th level gnome illusionist. Good times!
Boojum the brown bunny
P.S. Yes, I will talk about my characters at the drop of a hat, I'm such a geek.
Me too. A geek that loves D&D!
I'm really lucky that, even though I haven't been an 'active' player as long as we've been married, my wife still lets me buy the occasional RPG supplement, dice, and miniature. I like the rules books of all of the editions, but I have now come to agree with what you've just said. It's nice to not have to chase editions and their ever-changing rules. But the books are cool, and it allows me to do my part in keeping the hobby alive, I guess. But still using that very idea, I've come to terms with just sticking with NWN (3rd edition, not 3.5) as my main base right now, since I can do solo adventures with a small handful of scripted companions. Yeah... geeky, I know.
If you've never tried nwn, the entire collection of official releases is now sold at GOG.com for only 9.99! Less when it's on sale - but I didn't wait :)
It is a complete 3d D&D system with amazing DM features. It plays very much like tabletop D&D... better said, it can play like that when you have a group of people together. Building worlds is fun. You paint hings down in a very simple fashion, yet with all of the community support since 2000, there's nearly no limitations as to what you can put into it now. Playing the game is like watching your miniatures come to life on an animated table top, where wind blows, water flows, and beggars ask for coin. I have a beta world that I was making for DMing adventures made to make good use of the horseback riding that was added later. A full system that allows each player to summon their horse when needed, and can lead it to a safe place to wait until needed again. So I made winding trails that would take a full game day to get from one town or place to the next if you rode fast, straight through. For added fun, I created a light weight ambient life system for the wilderness areas, where the characters would catch glimpse of natural, non-threatening life of birds, rabbits, deer, bear, and other creatures. Those then had their predators. So once in a while, the characters would be treated to a Saber tooth attacking a deer, for example. Once I saw a blue hyena attack a deer, but there were several other deer in the area that came to aid their fellow... the hyena won the day... barely. Was most enjoyable to see. None of this ambient life would attack the PCs or NPCs or even the bad guys by default. But with a DM, anything can change. The DM is invisible and impossibly fast by default, but can become anything in the game, and the players don't have a clue whether it's the DM or someone that he or she added to the world. Really cool!
Ooops... sorry... I get carried away talking about this!
AD&D, GM, RPG, NWN, PC, NPC… it's really very easy to follow a conversation on this forum… there is a lexicon somewhere?
DOF, I know now, EP explained me but…:P
AD&D = Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
DM = Dungeon Master - The storyteller and referee of D&D
GM = Game Master (same as DM, but without the D&D connotations)
NWN = Neverwinter Nights (BioWare game for playing D&D on computers over networks)
PC = Player Character - The Characters controlled by the players of the game
NPC = Non Player Character - The Characters played by the DM or GM
RPG = Role Playing Game - D&D being the most popular example, each player adopts the role of a hero, of sorts, and plays that role in a story-telling based game. There are many from fantasy to modern day espionage, sci fi, steam punk, etc.,
Thank you, I print it!;-)
Hmmmm. I don't know if elements can do the depth pass thing. Can it do layer masks? Also, raytraced DOF would most likely benefit from more systems thrown at it, but the default render-time effect probably won't, as I believe it is still single threaded and also the host machine does the application of the effect.
Oh my goodness, I'd be more than happy to explain about everything as long as me geeking out doesn't scare you. We were discussing tabletop roleplaying games, as opposed to computerized roleplaying games. Creating my character portrait for said roleplaying games is how I got into 3d art to begin with.
AD&D = Advanced Dungeons and Dragons - versions 1 and 2. This is a roleplaying game based upon the original Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game.
GM - Game Master (also called DM, Dungeon Master) - The person who adjudicates the game, creates the world for the players to play in, and runs the adventure. Also known as she who must be bribed ;)
RPG - Roleplaying Game - A game where you create a character who's role you take in the playing of the game, much like an actor takes a role in a movie.
PC - Player Character - A character who's role a player takes up in the game. The player creates a personality to go with the characters basic abilities and skills and then interacts inside the game world with the other characters. When you are "in Character" then you are speaking based on your characters knowledge, personality, and opinions rather than your own.
NPC - Non-Player character - A character in the game world that is NOT being played by a player. Instead, the Game Master is in charge of running this character, portraying it's personalities, skills, habits, etc... This can be anything from a local shop keeper to an evil lich ruler of millions.
So when I say that my pictures are Character Portraits, I am saying that these are pictures I have created of the characters I am playing in roleplaying games. I use them to better flesh out my playing in the rather large number of games I'm playing in, showing others what my characters look like, or even making pictures just because a particular scene sticks in my head and I want a picture to remind me of it.
In the case of the picture being done here, a character of mine is about to change into a Bunnygoyle (cross between a bunny and a gargoyle.) I have been tipped off about this by the game master. Him being turned into this stuck in my head, so I began working on a picture to show him after he changes, using items found in the game masters description of what is going on in the world around him to draw on for inspiration.
I suspect you now know more than you ever wanted to know about the topic, but if you DO want to know more, let me know and I'll gladly talk about gaming AT LENGTH. *giggle* Yes, that last is a warning.
Boojum the brown bunny
DUDU is not a native English speaker, so our acronyms can be confusing. I forget that people from many countries come here to ask questions, give advice and help out.
It's good for me to be reminded of that occasionally, so I don't get into the habit of using to many colloquialisms and idioms. Wisconsin-isms is another matter, right Dart? ;-)
*giggle!* I know, believe me, I know. And I own NeverWinter Nights, though I haven't played it for a while now. I love that they made the dungeon builder for it so that fans can make their own adventures. The last time I played, however, they didn't have a very good rating system for the adventures that were being fan created.. I hope that has improved. It sounds like your having a lot of fun playing it, however!
If your jonesing for paper and pencil style gaming then you can play in the forums I run at http://www.boojumbunny.com/forum The current games being played there are AD&D 3.5, Pathfinder, Agris, Savage Lands, Stormbringer, Kingdomes of Kalimar, Champions, Fantasy Hero, and AD&D 2nd edition.
Boojum the brown bunny
Thanks for the advice. I know Elements has layers and Alpha Masks, but I'm not sure if that is the same as the map used for Depth of Focus in the full Photoshop. I'll have to check when I get home. Right now I'm going to let the current picture finish rendering, since I just started 2 more machines on my renderfarm last night to reduce the time a bit. Then I'll give a try doing one with a depth map to see if I can get the Photoshop Elements I have to make a decent picture. I'lll post them both so people can compare.
Boojum the brown bunny
Hi Boojum, I see your original screenshot and it is true that your render would be superb.
A question that I am posed: what represents the squares “N”, it is with your render in network?
You are correct in your assumption DUDU, those are networked computers. They all appear gray with the N. The only colored tiles are on the host machine. If you had five separate computers with multiple processors, each tile will look the same.
You have that exactly right. I have a renderfarm at my house, consisting of a bunch of Quad Core Intel CPU computers. Each square in the picture I posted (and yes, I shrunk the picture before posting it) represents a single core. The work that the Render nodes (computers running the Carrara Rendernode Software on my network) is doing is represented by a grey square with a big N in it. At the time of the screenshot I had 2 networked computers adding to my main computer, so 8 grey squares with N representing the cores of those computers. My MAIN computer is an i7 system with 8 cores. The numbered squares (numbers 1 - 8) represent the work being done by my main render machine.
Last night I added 2 additional quad core computers to the rendering effort. So now there are 16 grey squares with N on them. When you're in the middle of a batch render (the only way you can use rendernodes to help with the rendering) you can add additional computers using the following method.
1. Left-click the Pause button in the render window of the main machine.
2. Go to each current rendernode machine and restart the Carrara Rendernode software.
3. Start the rendernodes on the new machines to be added to the effort.
4. Left-click on Manage Rendernodes button in the Render window of the Main Carrara program, you should see all the nodes showing up in a state of Available.
5. When all the machines are showing, left-click on Resume to resume the render.
Be aware that if you have both Wifi and Ethernet on your computer your Carrara may look to the WRONG subnet when it looks for the rendernodes. For example, when my ethernet port on my home machine doesn't have a cable, it ends up with an IP address of 192.168.0.1. My home network is 192.168.1.X however. So I have learned to manually set the subnet my main computer looks for rendernodes on to 192.168.1.0 or it won't find them. :) Just a tip if you want to set up a renderfarm of your own.
Boojum the brown bunny
To say the truth, I already thought of it, knowing that exists.
Is it possible to mix machines 32 and 64 bits to do that?
Absolutely, yes you can mix and match machines. The only problem you will run into is that 32bit machines almost always render slower because you don't have a lot of RAM on them. They max out at 4GB of ram. You can also mix and match Apples and Windows machines. One thing to remember, however, is once you have everything set up and your content installed on your main machine, copy the data and extensions folders from our main machine's Carrara folder into your Render machines Rendernode folder, overwriting the Data and Extentions folders that are already there. The reason for this is that you may have plants and tools on your main machine that are not on your rendernode machines. The node will then render and use some default plugin or plant rather than the one your main machine works on.. so you can have weird squares mixed in with your good ones.
Boojum the brown bunny
A definitive maybe, ;-)
I use Carrara 7.2 Pro on my G5, which is a 64 bit PowerPC computer (PPC). Carrara 7 is 32 bit. I have a C7 render node installed on an Intel 64 bit iMac and a 32 bit PPC G4. I would use the main Carrara app on the iMac, but it's a bit unstable for scene building. The render node works great though.
Enso? Or no?
By the way... what's an ism?
There! *giggle* I started a new thread to help you out with your Renderfarm when you decide to try one.
Boojum the brown bunny
Ooooo....looking forward to seeing the end result.
I love playing around with render farms :) I should have mine up soon which will be its 4th or 5th iteration. The initial render farm that I built was with Pentium II sytems quite a few years ago :)
Sorry for the delay, but my wife wanted to see Suzan Boyle on the Internet… Thanks for this new thread, I am persuaded that will interest more of one!
Ok, well, I promised to show people the finished results! *giggle* Lets see now, 3 aborted renders (one networking issue that was my fault, 2 power outages) resulted in 9 days of no luck.. costing me about $31 in electricity bills. So I cheated and used the non-rendered depth of focus. Then I pulled my picture into Photoshop to photoshop in my rain, because I've never found a rain I like in Carrara.
For the rain, I had 2 layers of the picture in photoshop, with a rain layer between them.. Then..
1. I used a soft eraser with 50% opacity to lightly erase the top picture in places I wanted rain so the rain would show through.
2. I used a soft blur tool to then add additional streaks in the rain to make them blurrier, to improve the feeling of depth in the picture.
3. Then I saved it all in .png mode for your viewing pleasure!
Boojum the brown bunny
Impressive. You certainly got the wet day look. If I may suggest an idea for wet hair, I would try the hair clump shader. I've had some nice results using it.
HMmmm.. I might just revise this to give that a try. His fur is awful smooth and fluffy for someone who's wet.
Boojum
Here's a sample of what I was able to get. The amount of clump you use will be dependent on the hair. I also think that if the clump shader had a local space option, I used that as well.