Computer Setup

Came here to ask about the chair. Where is it from and how many limbs can I expect to pay for it?

Ack, $840 USD. Too rich for my blood.

How many pints can you spare? I know a guy in Transylvania.

You know when your new office chair comes with an iPhone app you're getting some sweet arse cushioning.

And you still do plenty of waiting on a computer?

Can I ask what it is you do that makes you wait when you have a 96-core rendering farm at your disposal?

4k multimillion polygon HDRI global illumination light refraction room shots? =)

Not trying to be rude here, I know nothing about your line of work, but multimillion polygon count sounds a bit obsolete since it has diminishing returns for the humanoid eye, but I'm guessing it's for scalability.

Not rude at all. It is for redundancy. If you model something for a product shot it needs to be high rez for reflections and stuff, and if you then put 20 of those in an environment it is going to be overkill. You can control it with multipliers on your subdivisions of course, and I do to some degree.

A product render goes fast if I am clever and optimize the scene. An hour? Two? Depending on the product of course. A full interior scene can take a lot more.

Let that shit mine some bitcoins!

I have thought of it. ;)

Litecoins are the new game. Bitcoins have become too rare to be worth the electricity cost to mine (unless you are in a join-mining group with a TON of other people).

Bitcoins are mined by doing complex mathematical equations typically by CPU power or GPU power.

Bitcoin mining with GPUs is no longer profitable. CPUs haven't been profitable even before that.

Can I ask what work you do in terms of CG art?

Photorealistic product images, environments. Simpler graphics too. For a large swedish DIY chain.

A hardware store basically, but for many other things. =)

Is that what those buckets and cans of paint are from? Or do you just get paid in liquids? Cool setup either way. :)

I drink paint thinner for lunch. I know, but it tastes so good!

Well, beats akvavit I guess.

It's Sweden, home of Ikea.

I wonder how many large swedish DIY chains there are...

Nope. Used to work there though. =)

*Cordless drill. Chordless would imply that it doesn't play music.

:D I'm glad you didn't take that as an attack, I was just pointing it out!

Ah I know them, you have a store close to me in the UK

If that home page is any indication, Europeans go in for the same cheap gadgets Americans do. I'm not sure why this surprises me.

That's funny, why don't they just take actual photographs of their products then do some touch up, wouldn't that be cheaper and easier?

Can i see some of your work? how much does that all cost?

It costs many monies. ;)

This is badass. Especially the chair.

I love it! It holds my ass in place like the gentle but firm gloves of a hundred valkyrias.

I hope you don't mind me asking some questions but:

They need the OS and the software, in this case 3ds max and V-ray. V-ray has a built in DR (distributed rendering) function. And I simply use remote desktop and some tools provided by microsoft to manage the slaves. =)

How do you get all of these computers to work in harmony with each other for the software? Just curious because I've seen "Farms" but never really looked into how they work together.

Sure, really simple... lol. Nice rig though. But I couldn't pull that software shit off.

Made sense to me... but basically he's saying all the computers have to be on the same network, and you tell the "main" computer which computers are the "slaves/drones".

BTW, the software that is open on the rightmost monitor is Remote Desktop Connection Manager from Microsoft. Super simple and has made my tweaking much easier. Instead of getting one window per RD session you get one with customizable thumbnails. Aweseome.

Look up a program called Deadline by Thinkbox software, or another called Qube. They help you manage farms like these and are pretty flippen sweet. I personally use Deadline.

Looks awesome, may I ask what software setup you use to tie together the 8 "old" PC's in the render farm? Have you thought about using GPU's in the future?

Did you test out VRay 3.0 beta yet?

Nice! Perhaps I'll check it out later before the holidays.. I'm afraid to screw up my installs right now because of heavy work load and tight deadlines. =)

Whats the monitor with the hood? I was looking at a new monitor for color-proofing.

An Eizo, dunno the model or year though. But it is sort of old and not super good. The rightmost Dell has a newer panel than the newer Eizos the image dudes use, the Eizo CG276. The Dell is a U2713H. I really like it. It doesn't have the annoying "chrystal effect" that the Eizos have.

I read that as "Ezio" at first, and I got excited because I though that you named your hooded monitor after hooded video game character [who is a bad-ass].

May I ask where you studied? I want to be a CGI artist/animator myself ;)

I have been doing 3d for a long time, since Truespace. I studied at a local university in Dalarna, Sweden. Took some introductory 3d courses, but me and my friend were a bit ahead by then so we are basically self-taught. My recommendation is to simply get ahold of a license and do a whole lot of online tutorials.

How exactly do you link all of those machines together to share the rendering?

I have described it in the earlier post, scroll a bit. =) Basically it is a feature in the render package. And it is really simple to set up if you know a bit about networking.

I know. but its still MY personal benchmark ;)

At first when I saw the far left screen I thought, "Holy fuck that's a lot of nodes clustered together" then I realized the nodes are on the middle screen.

The middle one is Max's slate material editor. It beats digging through the old one, but I see lots of professionals still using that one.

But, can it play Crysis?

Appreciate the attempt to be funny, but this one has died a long, long time ago, unfortunately for you, buddy.

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