Hi all,
It looks as if an idea of mine for a childrens t.v. series might take of and I've been asked to prepare a per episode budget.I did the 10 min pilot in Poser5 and wonder if its feasible to do the series in Poser.I can work out the man hours and therefore the number of persons needed but would like your opinions as to what the minimum spec machine would be that an animator would expect to work on.Also,while I have experience of networking machines together,I wonder if there are any ready made "renderfarm" options.All ideas and advice appreciated!

Congratulations on your project! I guess it's time to push this topic around again.... No native renerfarm function thru Poser6. My personal option: Each cut in my film is a pz3. That means some are 1-2 seconds, some are 5 seconds, some are 98 seconds, etc. I use "RenderCondo" idea. Any number of CPUs (you can employ KVM switch, don't need monitor on all of them)and feed them each their own pz3 to chew on. Render out to individ. frames, of course. Manage the files on an excel spreadsheet. Systematic naming/numbering scheme for frames. Each computer must have IDENTICAL stripped-down runtime and a seat of Poser ($99). Frankly, while some might see this as a kludge, I view it as workable. I am sure others will soon post on the viability of RMan variations, VUE Infinite, and just going up to Max or Maya or Lightwave, etc. Or Shade! Hardware? Always a cost/performance tradeoff. If not going superhighend on each, how about AMD 3200 or such (make sure it has 1024 L2Cache) and at least 1Gig RAM, better 1.5 and FAST HD. ::::: Opera :::::

We just put together a rack mounted system of computers that work great. 8 3.2 ghz machines with 2 gigs ram each. We use an 8 port KVM switcher (like operaguy mentioned). If I'm not rendering using the Max farm, we use the RenderCondo concept. It is a bit more work and requires notes to keep everything straight but it does a good job. Personally, the easiest to use and most successful setup to date for "us" is to use Poser scenes in Max through the Reiss Studio plugin. This way we can animate in Poser (which I've done for years) and then farm everything out using 3dsMax. You only need 1 copy of Max to do this so it isn't THAT expensive. I know, compared to what? :) As for machine speed for the animator? As fast as you can afford to get. The faster the machine the easier it is to animate. It also takes less time to animate if you aren't waiting on a slow machine which saves a ton of money in the longrun. Cheers, Joe

Can't claim to be a pro, as I don't make a living off of it, but here's my thoughts. Opera's rendercondo idea is certainly workable, if Poser can render all you need. If you are going to need or want actual exteriors, then you need to invest in Vue Infinite. Of all the terrain packages it is the most Poser friendly, supports psd output, so you can get your renders with seperate alpha layers for compositing, and a few other goodies. The network rendering for Vue is quite easy to set up; you only get a 5 node liscence out of the box, but additional liscences are available, and there is no listed upper limit. Some ancillary software to consider: (1)Metaform. This is WierdJuice Software's Python bases metablob generator for ProPack and P5. You can generate all sorts of meta effects, and very credible water, fire and other fluid effects have been created. The only problem with this is that the render condo would be useless for this; the geometry is created at runtime, and two computers would have variations in the created geometry. So usage of this would be limited to one computer, and the budget would be several minutes a frame. Easily. (2) Particle Illusion. This has been used professionally for some time in Cartoon Network and SciFi channel productions. It's and Open GL particle effect generator that has a substantial library of emitters, and the ability to custom create your own effects. There are colliders and occluders, so you can feed your video into PI and set effectors so that a fireball 'bounces off' a surface, or passes behind an object and vanishes from sight. You have the option of either creating an .avi composite in the app itself, or outputting the effects for compositing in a 3rd party app like After Effects. As far as hardware goes. If staying with Poser, go AMD. P4's could actually hurt your rendertimes, as Poser is not hyperthread aware (or MP aware for that matter), and the presence of hyperthreading can cause a performance hit, as it eats cycles and does nothing in return. Despite not being 64 bit software, and Athlon 64 would be the best bet. P2's or below for a rendercondo would probably be too slow. If you go with Vue Infinite, then any system capable of running a RenderCow (the remote client) is fair game; and for Infinite, you can mix Mac and PC's on the network. The fastest HDD's are SATA drives, and if you choose those, you need to make -certain- that there is adequate cooling. These drives run quite a bit hotter than Ultra 133 drives do, and can easily kill themselves with heat. With any tech, avoid the bleeding edge; for production, you need reliability more than you need the Latest and Greatest...once the bugs are worked out. If you can get it, Use Win2k Pro on the clients; far more stable than XP, and without all the goofy shit that eats your system resources.

Damn Joe, that sounds like a nice setup..... (drool) I've been thinking of shifting my current rendergarden into rack cases, just to get the mess organized. Aside from a dedicated power feed and ventilation, any particular gotchas to watch out for?

Hey Dale, It is pretty awesome to have all the machines rendering. Funny thing is, I feel guilty if I go to sleep at night with nothing rendering. :) Don't put the rack anywhere close to your bedroom if you want to get any sleep. LOL... These things are loud. It's like an airport. One thing we did that helps with heat is to mount the computers in the rack with a space in between each one. SO... it's computer, computer sized space, computer computer sized space etc... It takes up more space this way but we still have room for 4 more computers and another kvm in the 5' tall rack that everything is mounted in. If you don't do this the computers will overheat and shut down unless you live in the North Pole and leave the windows open. Another thing is to make sure that all the computers are on standby power modules. This saved my bacon when the power went out on us. Everything was black but the machines were still humming along. Oh.... LOL another thing. Make sure you mark your cables to avoid a freakin nightmare. LOL Everything else was easy. I was amazed at how easy this all went together. We bought the computers with XP Pro preinstalled. All we needed to do was verify that XP updates were current and then go in and load the software and start rendering. Max has a great feature called "Archive". It creates a .zip file of your scene with every single texture map included with the directory structure intact. This gives you the ability to do anything you need to do on your workstation without having to worry if each and every machine has the proper files. We archive, extract the archive onto each machine and we have 8 machines that are identical without having to think about it. Anyway... I hope this helps, Joe

Thanks! A couple of nice tidbits in there. As for noise...when I have an animation rendering and all the machines in my office running, that totals out to 16 4" fans and 9 smaller ones (CPU, chipset, and graphic cards), so you could say I have one hell of a white noise zone there... That does sound like a nice feature. Now if Max didn't have (1)such a steep learning curve and (2) an equally steep price...at least for us one man studio wannabe's.... :P

The Max $3000 license lets you render on as many nodes as you want? Maxx told me that the base 3DS Max includes Mental Ray. "I feel guilty if I go to sleep at night with nothing rendering" I can relate to that 100%. I've got 4 CPU's here. If I don't wake up to a four-airplane formation, the day just does not seem right. My pet name for my animation machine, with dual 10,000 RPM Raptors, each with their own fan, a CPU fan and two case fans is: Sikorski. ::::: Opera :::::

"Maxx told me that the base 3DS Max includes Mental Ray." Yes, v6 and up has MentalRay fully integrated. Of course, there's still scanline if you want it.

I believe that Max ships with Mental Ray licenses for 4 machines. Unlike the scanline renderer, all render nodes require that Mental Ray is licensed. Any more than 4 requires additional purchased licenses. The scanline renderer is unlimited. I've been using the scanline because I know it's fast. I haven't started to use Mental Ray yet. Is is easy to use? Is it as fast as the scanline renderer? I know that Max's scanline renderer is one of the fastest out there. Operaguy: That's funny. I've been refering to ours as "The Rack".

"Is is easy to use? Is it as fast as the scanline renderer? I know that Max's scanline renderer is one of the fastest out there." Easy to use? Not "as" easy as scanline. When you get into using GI and other such things as micropoly displacement, settings can be overwhelming at first, until you know what you're doing. Is it as fast as scanline? Yes and no. Well, it IS faster at rendering large complex scenes because of it's superior memory handling, but MentalRay is not widely known for it's blazing speed. It's quality is unsurpassed though, and it's not exactly "slow", like Firefly is considered to be. However, it's not as fast as Vray or Brazil.

Maxxx: I've been looking into Final Render. Some of the renders I've seen look pretty amazing. The thing that really caught my eye is that you can use standard Max materials in that renderer. I don't know if there is some hidden "but" in there though. I also don't know yet how fast it is. People in the Cebas forums seem to really like it though.

LawinDart, I have FinalRender Stage-1. It's great. Yes, it uses all the standard Max materials, including raytrace materials. It can also use it's own powerful shader system as well. It's got some really great lighting options, including object lights, cylinder lights, and it's own fast volumetric effects. It's also compatible with just about any plugin out there for Max. It also has a GREAT selection of G-Buffer output channels. If you're like me, you will LOVE having G-Buffer output seperation of every channel you can think of for tweaking in post. The only downside of FinalRender I've found is this: It's much slower than Brazil, Vray, or even MentalRay at rendering GI, particularly when high anti-aliasing settings are involved. I'm sure if I were an expert with the settings, I could tweak them perfectly, but so far I haven't been able to find a "middle ground" between speed and quality when it comes to GI in FR Stage-1. If you avoid GI, then FR Stage-1 can be very fast, but quality anti-aliasing is still slower than it should be. For animation, you can use some lower settings, and it comes out very well.

Thanks Maxxx, This is great input. Thanks for taking the time. G-Buffers are my friend. I love G-Buffers. If I was a super hero, I think I would use that as my super hero name. "G-Buffer" I guess you could say it would be my... Anti-Alias! nyuck nyuck This sounds like it is a good option. The Achilles heal would obviously be the speed. Man... That always seems to be an issue. :) I think all the good points make it worth it. Thanks again