If you want to see a REALLY, REALLY good animation, check out Three Legged Legs’ Samurai. It’s about 2-3 minutes long and it’s a wonderful little cartoon set in a stylized ancient japan.

A pretty interesting animation was done on Blender by an Arabic team. You can watch it here.

(all of these are pictures of Relient K, even in the sections when I’m talking about other bands)

My wife and I went to the Relient K concert yesterday in Baltimore. We were the oldest people there as I’ve been following them since their first album (which came out around 8-10 years ago), while many of these kids just started listening to them ever since they started getting airplay on Mtv. The opening act, Sherwood, was actually really good. I like them a lot. Their style sounds pretty similar to Relient K. Pretty happy music overall. Some girls in front of us knew every word and were bootlegging the performance on tiny video cameras. I’d buy their CD if I had some extra cash. The second group, Mae, was not so good. At least, I didn’t like them. Unlike the other two groups, they didn’t have the same type of sound and their singer, in my wife’s opinion, couldn’t sing. We took their set as an opportunity to go outside and get some fresh air. It was funny to see all the parents there.

I reviewed last night’s render today and I found a few little gaffes here and there. I made a list and fixed them up. I’m pretty confident that the next time I will be rendering the definitive version of the film. I’m pretty psyched. All that’s left now is to start up on the credits and add in the soundtrack. I’m hoping to be able to tap into some musical talent to do the soundtrack, but I haven’t found anyone yet. If you want to volunteer your skills, leave a comment.

Well, the rendering is now done for “Jose’s Dinner”! Quite an improvement over 25 hours! Thanks to DrQueue, it only took 9 hours and 36 minutes! That is quite impressive! And, it would have been even better if my Windows computer had actually had DrQueue installed. I did a calculation that had me rendering 283 frames on Windows and letting the *nix boxen take care of the rest via DrQueue, but the Windows computer finished a litter earlier than I had expected (partially due to the laptop acting up). So the system wasn’t as efficient overall as it could have been. Could it have been as short as 8 hours? I’ll tell you one thing, though, it certainly is nice being able to have it finish over 9 hours. Instead of leaving it to render over night and waking up with it still going and then still going through work, it can now be done overnight. (At least for this particular animation with its level of complexity) If I can convince some more people to donate their POS computers to me, perhaps I can have myself a mini-Pixar. q;o)

Well, today I finished up all the animation details on “Jose’s Dinner” and set it to render. I’m excited to see how long the render will take. I started it at 1438 today. However, it hasn’t been without hitch. Due, I think, to the wireless card trying to kick in, the laptop rendered for a while then suddenly couldn’t find the network anymore. That cost me about 30 minutes where the laptop wasn’t rendering - so that will skew the stats a bit. q:o(

Another wonderful comic from xkcd:

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!