Vance G

When I click on the link on the hash.com site for the FTP server, ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub, nothing comes up. It appears the ftp server is up and running; I can connect via the command-line. The problem appears to be that the ftp server requires a login and when logging in as "guest," it requires a password. I tried "password" as the password and neither that nor a blank password succeeds at logging in, which is what I think the browser does. I also tried the Edge browser (which I never use) and it didn't work either. -Vance

Thanks for the tip! I'll give it a shot next time. -Vance

Yes, I'm using NetRender with a 3096 MHz i9 processor, so it is running 8 slaves. The early versions of the choreography, when I wasn't doing anything expensive, rendered remarkably quickly, the first 20 seconds rendering in a couple of hours at 720x1280 with multi-pass! This one, 59 seconds or 1770 frames at 1080x1920, set up for 16 passes with softening and motion blur (plus reflection and particles/hair) took 26 hours and 43 minutes. As for the bird peeling off of the page, I created a pose for the bird, rendered it with alpha channel, and used the rendered image (composited with the old paper texture) as a decal on the book. The bird in the same pose and the same size is below the page and moves upward, with the pose relaxing as it comes up. The music is the Berceuse (lullaby) section of Stravinsky's Firebird (that's a portrait of Igor himself in the video), of which I did a prog rock version. Thanks for any comments you might have! -Vance

Here's the first 59 seconds in a more finished state. I lucked into doing it in the way that was the best for me. I lit everything using the standard lighting that is in a new choreography and added a little global ambience, and everything rendered quickly. Then, after I had the whole scene working the way I wanted it to, I turned down the standard lighting and added mood lighting (3 bulbs and some props). When I did that, renders started taking about 5 times as long. It made the whole process go a lot quicker to have the slow rendering happen only at the end.

Very nice, Fucher! -Vance

Thanks for the help, Rob! -Vance

I print ABS on my 3D printer (most inexpensive FDM printers print PLA), and it is quite durable and has a high melting point, meaning stuff I print does not fall apart even in a hot car. My wife was dubious about the 3D printer when I got it (she banished it to the garage), but it won her over as I've printed parts to fix a variety of household issues. I normally don't use A:M to design parts. You can get a free license as a hobbyist for Autodesk Fusion 360, which is made for designing parts. And I also designed a replacement keyboard stand for my keyboard at work a couple of years ago after the piece disappeared over a long weekend!

I recently started doing lots of large (for me anyway) rendering jobs on my Dell Windows computer I purchased the end of last year, which has an Intel i9 processor. The i9 processor has 8 cores (most desktop i7s have 4). Each core can run two threads of normal programs, but each has only one math processor. As a result, you can run 8 NetRender Messengers (slaves) at a time, as rendering is all math. I'm getting 45 seconds of animation (1,350 frames) at 720p rendered in a little over two hours! The last time I was rendering large numbers of frames (on a dual-core machine a few years back), it would take around 18 hours to do a similarly sized batch. I've found that turning on the Open MP setting in the Job Wizard causes it to run more slowly, at least on my machine. One question I have is whether there is a way to configure the Render Server to start 8 slaves when it starts up? It starts 2 slaves, and I have to manually start the other 6. Anyway, thanks to the folks at Hash for making it work seamlessly on the new processor (the i9 was quite new when I bought my machine), taking full advantage of its processing power! -Vance

Here's a test of the first 47 seconds or so, with a rough cut of the music, which is a prog rock version of the Berceuse (Lullaby) from Stravinsky's Firebird.

Thanks everyone! I certainly will provide updates and let you see the final version. On the one you've seen I've already fixed a couple of things (the camera path was a little off of where it should have been, the talisman slid in the drawer a bit, it needed to be tightened up by about a second). When I get a few more seconds done, I'll post an update.

It looks like the iframe did not work. Here's a link: -Vance

I'm a prog musician (I play in a couple of prog bands signed to small labels: https://mrrmusic.com/project/gekko-projekt/, https://bombergoggles.bandcamp.com/album/gyreland), and I'm working on a solo album. One of the pieces on the solo album is a prog version of a section of Stravinsky's Firebird. I'm working on a video to go along with it. Here's 20 seconds of the work in progress. <iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/532926484" width="640" height="564" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe>