Omar Domenech’s Demo Reel

[Omar Domenech]

Hey @tobles , after Kent makes some test and gives the green light, I will make a small post summarizing what to do. But it’s fairly straight forward, use Blender 2.79, decide if you’ll go with your CPU or GPU and hit the animation button. Rendered files will automatically fall into where they need to go. 

[Omar Domenech]

@theluthier One thing I’ve noticed is that it seems you need to have the desktop app from Google Drive to use this correctly.

Also it looks like if you’re rendering away, you’ve render a couple of frames, and then you hit cancel because you need to shut your computer down or something, the file that is canceled stays as an EXR with the number of the frame but its size is if 0kb. The problem here is that I think Blender will see that as if the EXR frame is rendered, set and done but it’s actually a canceled one 0KB one and it will jump that frame.

[Kent Trammell]

Apologies for dragging my feet a bit @dostovel. This weekend I had issues syncing the folder you shared only to find out it was an issue with the 3rd party app I was using on linux. I solved it with another app and will be able to test tomorrow (currently out of the home office on a chromebook).

Considering that, it’s surely best to use the official desktop app for Mac / Windows since it’s free and official.

You’re also correct about cancelling a render. That 0KB file is the ‘placeholder’. When the frame is finished it replaces the placeholder with the final image but if you cancel it leaves the placeholder. To fix we just need to delete the 0KB placeholders, re-open the .blend file and hit render so blender automatically fills the missing frames in the sequence.

From what I can tell, the sync setup via google drive looks to be working. I just need to do a test render or two to confirm, then we can invite the whole world to help!

[Omar Domenech]

@theluthier Do you think I should keep it under a minute? As it is now it will probably go to 1 minute 30 seconds long. Is it too much? should I cut down time and therefor render time? 

Every EXR is about 25MB if I keep a scene below 600 frames, 15GB of Google Drive should do. It’ll be a matter of uploading Scene 1 to Google Drive, render it, copy paste rendered files to my local hard drive, delete from drive, upload scene 2, repeat again and again for what it’ll be at least 10 scenes.  😰

Sometimes I don’t understand Blender’s file path. Sometimes the path breaks, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes you pack a texture into the .blend, sometimes it goes missing. Sometimes the library path holds up, sometimes you open the file and the path is broken. Sometimes you do it on a PC and it works, sometimes you make the path on a Mac and the path gets set up differently. 

Blender needs an asset manager ASAP.

[William Miller]

At the Houdini 17.5 launch event, they announces a new software they were working on called PilotPDG, which is basically an asset manager that can be used with any software.  I’m not sure if it has been released yet, but if it has, it might help?

[smurfmier1985]

@dostovel I don’t know about Modeling reels for sure, but for Animation reels 1 min 30 secs is considered the ideal length. 1 minute or less is a student reel who haven’t got much work yet, anything longer than 2 minutes suggests you can’t choose your best works and recruiters loose their interest because it’s taking too long…

Also for animation reels they advice to start with your best shot (to grab attention) and to end with your second best shot (to leave the receivers with a good impression, wanting to see more). Might work great in terms of best model & second best model as well.

Additionally, only include your best work. Your reel is only as strong as your weakest shot (weakest model), so make sure the stuff in between is professional quality as well.

Hope this helps..

[Omar Domenech]

@smurfmier1985 I guess I can maybe leave it at 1:30. Who knew 30 seconds could be such a long time. Props to that Albert fellow. 

@williamatics I don’t know but if it can be used in Blender I would get it. Maybe there is an addon in the blender market. Let me go check.

EDIT: There is. I will be buying that.

https://blendermarket.com/products/asset-management

[Kent Trammell]

@dostovel I second what @smurfmier1985 said about duration.

[Kent Trammell]

@dostovel I [finally] got around to testing your scene. You’ve set it up great! Only thing I had to do was edit the output file path to be relative. Your instructions are great btw!

As one last test, can you open each of your .blends and check that the output file path starts with: //Render Output/…

If that renders as expected to the proper directory, that means your .blends are ready for anyone to open and start rendering! I will update the original thread with instructions.

PS: I just realized that 2.7x requires CUDA installed for GPU and my linux OS isn’t supported (debian 9 stretch). So I can’t render these scenes with GPU and CPU is taking over an hour per frame. HOWEVER I can enable CUDA jut fine on 2.8 without having the cuda toolkit installed (?! Not sure how that’s possible). So if you want to update your scenes to render in 2.8, I could render faster with GPU. Not required or anything, just an option.

[Kent Trammell]

@dostovel I just noticed you’re not using denoising. Any reason in particular? I think that could speed up render time significantly.

[Aaron Rudderham]

Definitely willing to help on this, though one (probably dumb) question: how do we who know’s rendering what? We don’t want overlap of course. Unless we just mention it here obviously.

[smurfmier1985]

@theluthier I believe he doesn’t like how mushy the renders turn out when using denoising…

[smurfmier1985]

@thecabbagedetective I believe they’ve tackled that with placeholder stuff, so you can never render the same frame as someone else is rendering.

[Omar Domenech]

Thanks for taking the time and checking everything out.

@theluthier Yes, the reason is that I get the feeling there is a crispiness that the render looses when I turn Denoising On. I was noticing muddiness in the renders and after a couple of testing I found Denoising to be the culprit. I guess it’s just in the nature of how it works. But that was in render images, maybe in animation is not noticeable since there’s motion blur anyways. I was getting that with the setting left in default, I even turned them down a bit so it didn’t get so mushy, still I got that mushy vibe.

You think I should turn it on? then do a couple of test the figure out a happy medium with lower samples?

Also could you explain the “Relative Path” thing, I have never understood that. There was an old Jonathan Williamson tutorial about that I saw years ago, but it’s not available anymore. I wish I had downloaded that.  

I haven’t used Blender 2.8 but I guess this is a good time as any. I will get on it ASAP in getting the file ready so you can use the GPU. It’s worth it, that speeds up the renders significantly. I do have to go through the 2.8 learning curve though.

Since it’s only 15GB of space available, it’s going to have to be one file at a time. Once the frames of the first file are all done, I will copy paste the resulting EXR into my local disk and delete them from Google Drive so it frees up the GB space and then it’ll be file #2 turn. Once the two files from that scene are all rendered up, the it’ll be the second scene with another two more files turn, and so on and so on. 

One question, people need 15GB of their own Google Drive to do this? I thought the only 15GB that it was going to take up was the one that I created for this.

Another question: should I turn Motion Blur on in the render tab? I normally do it on the compositor but I have gotten weird artifacts from time to time and I don’t know if its worth the risk? I know turning it on on the render tab will have to be payed with render time though. 

As soon as you answer and the last things are taken care of, I will leave my laptop and the 4 iMac at the office where I work rendering away.  😱

EDIT: Oh another thing, Once the “Car Modeling scenes is all done, I will delete it from Google Drive and get the next scenes uploaded. Does that mean I will have to generate the link for that scenes and it will be a different Google Drive link to have permissions for that new folder?

[Kent Trammell]

@thecabbagedetective Miranda is correct that the “Placeholders” setting in the output panel means we can all render together and Blender will automatically render only frames that have no place holder (i.e. haven’t begun rendering). Without that we would all have to organize and communicate to avoid duplicate renders.

@dostovel If samples are too low, denoising can definitely muddle the final image quality. I’m doing a test now at 500 samples + denoising and I will compare. No denoise takes 1hr 25min on my machine. That’s long even for my old computer ha. It’d be ideal if we can get it down to 30 min or else we’ll be rendering for a long time or need a bunch of volunteers.

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