Omar Domenech’s Demo Reel

[Omar Domenech]

@theluthier Perfect, thanks for the help. I’ll get right on it and let you know as soon as I finish. I wanted to build an environment, like a hangar of sorts but I backed down as soon as I saw how many hours would go into creating it. For it to look good it has to have a lot of details and a lot of back and forth as it has t be design on the fly and that requires lots of time. 

But I think I’ve got an idea that I can pursuit that might look good and wont suck up so much time. I’ll get on that soon as well.

I rendered frame 1 on the iMac were I work at and it was 1 hour 6 minutes one frame and yours was 10 to 3 minutes 😰 Shame on you Apple, it’s a 4,000 dollars computer.

[Omar Domenech]

@theluthier I did a couple of things: 

– The file with the Z pass and Vector Pass enabled to make the motion blur in compositing was 50MB to 60MB, the file with no passes enabled but motion blur by default was 15MB. Render times were not that much different. So I opted to make both files with no passes enabled whatsoever so they were 15MB and that way Google Drive space will be enough but most importantly it’ll probably help with the file duplicating since it will be easier to upload and sync 15MB files then 60MB files. 

– Samples are at 256. I’ve never done renders with samples so low but it seems to work fine.

– Eliminated the tiled texture on the background and kept details on the floor. 

– Made the background darker since the Heli and the background were the same shade of gray and there wasn’t enough contrast for the Heli to stand out. 

– If you agree with the changes and give the green light, then Code Green is a go.

[Kent Trammell]

@dostovel I like the changes! Very clean and focus 100% on the heli. Let the rendering commence 📢

I’ll change the title of the thread to indicate it’s render-ready. Also something interesting I stumbled upon hdri-haven’s patreon:

Apparently shared Google Drive folders only occupy cloud storage space for the owner of the folder. That’s pretty cool.

[Omar Domenech]

@theluthier Great. Thanks for checking it all out. And so it begins again. Tomorrow is my last day here at work, I’ll be taking a two weeks vacation so I wont be able to render with this 4  computers here. That’s a shame, they were really helpful.

I guess Google Drive just got a bit better. Lets see how it behaves this time with lower file sizes.

[Kent Trammell]

I stumbled upon the SheepIt render farm website yesterday. I think I remember it from years ago..It’s basically a website + desktop app to systematically do what we’re doing with your reel renders @dostovel: People register with the website, download the app, and make their system available to render other people’s Blender scenes. It looks like the scene data is kept private (aside from a small thumbnail that appears in the app GUI when a frame is finished – which is kinda fun to see a preview of what you’re rendering).

You can even setup a “team” for designating certain people to prioritize a certain project (like this reel for example). It works on this credit system where rendering other’s projects gains credits and getting your renders done by others costs credits. Pretty cool way to measure giving VS taking in the community.

Has anyone used it before? I’m testing it now by rendering other people’s projects and building up some credits before I submit a project to test myself. Curious if it reliably finishes projects in a reasonable amount of time.

This could be a more official version of what we’re doing.

[Omar Domenech]

@theluthier I clicked the link, it all looks and sounds great. Let me know how your test goes. I could subscribe to that since after this I would like to do more videos and animation, still images feels like it’s not going to cut it for me anymore.

I put a small video test of the Heli in the Results folder. There’s two or three frames with a bit of weird ghosting that pops up, but it’s no big deal. In the part were the camera runs from above it looks a bit jittery, maybe there’s not enough frames per second, but that can stay like that for now.

[William Miller]

@theluthier I do not recommend Sheepit.  I never found out how to do anything with it.

[smurfmier1985]

@theluthier 

I brought this one up in February/March after live critiques, Pavel knew it and had this to say:

 

  

The steeling thing is also true the way you do it now, except in this case you know the community and they are great 😊

 

[Omar Domenech]

@smurfmier1985 Oh sheep, that’s some bad news. Maybe Kent will have better luck? The other option would be Denis’s Barista addon. I know how much the addon costs, but I don’t know how much is Amazon’s servers fees, so I can’t calculate how much you’d be spending if you rendered all your stuff with that. 

[Kent Trammell]

@smurfmier1985 I completely forgot you mentioned it. I should have tried it back then.

I’m curious about @nekronavt‘s experience. He’s right that you can’t start rendering your own project as soon as you sign up. Sheep it requires you to render 10 frames of other people’s projects in order to submit your own for rendering. But I don’t see that as a cost. I mean technically the cost of electricity to run your computer I suppose. I see it as a small commitment for everyone joining. The whole thing only works if there’s as much give as there is take. I render yours, you render mine; I scratch your back you scratch mine.

As for security, I haven’t been able to crack into anyone’s Blender scene file. I get .zips added locally but they’re all password protected. Unless Pavel knows something I don’t, it seems pretty secure to me.

I let half of my computer’s resources render other peoples’ projects (also CPU for SheepIt, GPU for Omar) for 18 hrs and I’m already in the top 50% of renderer’s for this month and ranked 517th overall. I find the points system brilliant! It comes with these badges to unlock. Like a game for lending your computer to others for rendering.

I’m only seeing positive things so far. The real test will be submitting a project of my own to test efficiency. Will do that ASAP and report back.

[Omar Domenech]

@theluthier Kent I was thinking, maybe it is a good thing that from time to time the folder with all the rendered EXR on Google Drive be cleared out. For example, the next frame is frame 345, so there are 344 EXR files, if someone wants to jump in to render at this point, they are going to have to sync 344 files before they start to render and that takes a lot of time. I can just copy paste all the EXR files that are already rendered to my local drive, move the Timeline in the .blend file to start at frame 345, save the file, clear the Google Drive folder and start fresh. If someone wants to jump in, they don’t have to sync so many files and things can move up quicker.  Do I give it a go at this strategy?

[Kent Trammell]

@dostovel Yeah I think you could try clearing out. Just be sure to update the .blend start frame to coordinate with the already-rendered frames.

The only issue I foresee is people who are rendering the original file already. Will their blender session start rendering the cleared out frames? I don’t *think* so. If I remember correctly the placeholder system doesn’t look backward from the frame it just rendered, only forward. So it shouldn’t be a problem but we shall see.

[Omar Domenech]

@theluthier Yeah I’ve had that same experience before, the placeholders doesn’t look back, it keeps going forward so it seems it’ll be alright. I think Jack tells Rose the same thing in the Titanic. I haven’t seen that movie in perhaps 20 years, jesus christ. 

I have learned a couple of things doing this project. Perhaps the thing that caught me most off guard was the samples a scene needed. It’s a different approach when you’re doing just a still image than when you’re rendering hundreds of frames. I figured that if the Toyota scene needed 1,000 samples to clear up, then the Heli scene would need double that amount since it’s a much more complicated scene, but then magically it got away with just 256 samples. How in the world? I had never rendered something with so low samples and for such an intricate model. 

But then after doing another scene with the Heli that has a sun lamp and no HDRI in it, renders were coming out with much more noise and needed much more samples to clear and the other 256 sample scene had no lamps and only only simple HDRI, so that’s were the key is in all this. 

Also it looks like there really is a science behind layout, depth of field, camera placement, composition lines, etc. I notice my eyes are all over the place when seeing the frames all rendered in a movie sequence. You can’t just go about throwing the camera wherever you like and focusing anywhere, framing and planing the layout of each shot turns out is quite a big deal.

[Omar Domenech]

@theluthier Wow wow, looks like you send Linux Luke to train with Yoda. I go to scene 2 and you had already demolished half of it all by yourself. 

Scene 1 is done!

[smurfmier1985]

@dostovel I was thinking of you and out of curiousity I checked ArtStation for jobs in Canada. Maybe you should consider moving to Europe, lots of job openings there according to ArtStation 😱 and we have less cold temperatures 😛😂

I also saw some in Canada b.t.w. but mostly for games (in fact, most job openings there are for game studios it seems…) 

How is the job hunting going? Any news, or is the demo your best bet? Hope you’re doing well

[Author]

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