Ok, so adding in the laptop really improved the render time on the farm. It went from 405 seconds to 260 seconds! So it went from 6.75 minutes to 4.3 minutes!! Now THAT is a dramatic improvement! It basically cut the rendering time in half. So, with this setup, it should take roughly 12 hours to render “Jose’s Dinner”. Not bad compared to 25 hours! I wanted to have one other comptuer participate, but my master died so I had to have that other computer replace the master’s job. I hope it’s just a bad network card. Wed I’m going to open her up and see if I can clean it and reseat the card and see if it will work correctly.

Ok, so on 20 April, I rendered a bouncing ball to see which was faster, Linux or Windows.

Back to Basics: Bouncing Ball from djotaku

In that post, we saw that it took my Linux computer 481 seconds and my Windows computer 453 seconds. So for a slightly longer than one second animation, the windows computer was about 30 seconds faster to finish it. So one might reason that a 2 minute video would finish 1 minute faster and so on as time goes by. So it could become relevant for a long enough animation.

It took me nearly all day, but after consulting one source after another I finally got drqueue to run on my computer. It’s actually very easy to do….if someone actually gives you good directions!

The key to make it work for me was setting up the master and slave .confs and creating the etc, logs, and tmp directory in the same nfs shared folder that I had placed my blend file in. Once I did, it worked like a charm!

For my latest animation, " Jose’s Dinner", I was using Cinelerra for the 2D animatic. I was working on it while I was at my in-law’s house so I was using the laptop. However, we try to use the laptop as little as possible to keep extend the life of the laptop, so when I got back home I wanted to work on it here. However, the files were in different folders than on the laptop. But, since Cinelerra uses XML files, all I had to do was load the file into Emacs and do a find/replace to replace the old folders with the new ones and it worked! With a binary file that would be impossible since the information is not represented as text!

It can be found here, but in case it disappears, I’ve reproduced it.

Zero and her Origin

Zero, the number said to be discovered Nine times by ancient magicians, was Found again by a mysterious order of Nine modern alchemists, who built One machine after another, until finally One exploded with fascinating results. No fire emerged from its Twin engines, but instead Nine small automata crawled out, Denying the proposition that energy, Seven millenia or more in the accumulation, For most purposes, remains Ever constant, throughout the Three ages of man’s civilization.

Well, these guys came up with a survey that tells you which Linux distribution you should use. I took the test and it predicted all the ones I use (Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian). You should check it out!

This picture:

is now my #1 most viewed photo over this one:

While cleaning up the animation for “Jose’s Dinner”, I was having a bit of trouble with the character’s mouth. I told it to open, but it still appeared closed.

It turns out that when I duplicated him and didn’t use the duplicate, I forgot to erase it. So there was a duplicate right underneath. What I was seeing was the closed mouth of the duplicate inside. It was as though he had eaten himself! Once I fixed this, it explained some of the problem I had been having and now, he was able to open his mouth!!

I set “Jose’s Dinner” to render from beginning to end to test the eye and mouth movements I’ve done so far. It’s almost done, but it’ll probably need another hour. So it took around 25 or so hours to render on one computer. Now I have a benchmark against which to see how fast the renderfarm is. Remember that most of my computers are old POS donated computers. So I don’t know how much it will be able to speed things up. Tomorrow I will probably do a test render with the bouncing ball to see how much more quickly that one renders. I’ll be excited to see the results.

A pretty neat music video was made using Blender and it can be found here. It’s for the song “Machines” by KissKiss