DevLog: She's All Lubed Up: Render Beast Ready to Pound Out Scenes

Quick reminder: You can follow development more closely on the Trello board

TLDR;

• Switched from EEVEE to Cycles going well

• Hardware advancements on Render Rig

• Scenes are progressing!

✅ Last Week's Progress

What I accomplished since the last update:

• Scene 8 - Like I said last week: I'll be re-working this scene to work in Cycles. Thankfully, I've been able to keep 90% of the lighting, although the output looks completely different. This scene is just about ready to be rendered out; just waiting on the render rig's hardware (check out the Technical Corner). I'm trying out optimization techniques to hopefully move it along before the hardware upgrades.

• Scene 9 - I'm excited for this next scene, which calls for a cafeteria/break-room - and what's super exciting is that you get to see more of the interior of the giant PRISM facility, and gain some insights to what it's like in there! I'm really glad that all of my skills have come to a point where I can reasonably and quickly put together not only the characters in a scene, lighting, compositing, etc., but also modelling, kit-bashing, and creating a space where characters can interact in - I think this one took me less than a week to finish, and what I love is that it's completely custom! I'll beginning posing very soon - still need get maybe another character for the scene.

⚙️ Technical Corner

Blender Man
This is my render rig and over the last few weeks, I've been working on the side to upgrade it so that it's ready to be a dedicated rendering machine. I had generously gotten this machine from a friend a few weeks ago - when he gave it to me it was an AMD Ryzen 7 2700x, 32GB (DDR4), NVIDIA 2080 8GB VRAM, 700W PSU, with no hard-drive. I've slowly been buying parts for it to ramp it up to be something useful. At first, I found an old 1.5TB hard-drive that I had laying around. Got the operating system and the rendering software (Blender's Flamenco) up and running (just all of the small tedious set-up that goes with setting up an Ubuntu rendering server). Bought a 3090 (24GB VRAM) - this was the cheaper option that got a "good enough" GPU. Unfortunately, the GPU had a 2x8 PSU PCIe connector and the previous PSU had 2x4 + 6 connector... soo I had to buy a power supply. LITTLE DID I KNOW (or rather: I should've checked before buying), the power supply only came with ONE PCIe connector, where I needed two. So I bought a 12vhpwr to 2x8 pin that worked. 👍️ The last thing that I'm waiting on is a faster storage device. Remember that old hard-drive I mentioned? When rendering a scene and the RAM gets full, it overflows (also known as "swap storage") onto the hard-drive - but with this hard-drive being, well, mechanical and old and about 500MB/s, the rendering time skyrockets 50x. What was once a 2 minute render, turns into more than an hour long render!!! And as you know: prices for RAM are... just not an option, NVMe storage device is the next best option right now - which I'll be waiting another day or two for... so much waiting... 😫 In the meantime, I've been tinkering with ways to optimize the scene to make it smaller, but this sometimes can reduce image quality.

Blender's Flamenco (render farm software)

👀 Sneak Peek

Cafeteria / Break-Room

💬 Community Corner

I want to express my appreciation for all of the other developers, the community, everybody else who's helped me recently - you all help me keep going. The development has been rockier than I would've liked, and I appreciate everyone's patience 😻 One things for sure: the development workflow is getting easier, smoother, and faster!

See you in the next one! ™️

Don't forget to check out the Trello board for detailed progress updates! ❤️