True ambience is enabled.

Is it true that Bryce is slow?:blink:

Long time without the full computer,,,  The object looks good...

Thanks Tom.  I modeled the chad drone years ago when it first made a splash on the internet.  I need to finish mapping it.

This is the type of scenario that I want to help people out with.  Once I get my rig up and running we can do some benchmarks and see how good it is.

True ambience is a killer.

What's the resolution at which you're rendering, and how much RAM does your system have?

I'm just curious,....... is it that long because it is that big a render with gazillions of rays and subpixel AA or are you using a system that's borderline with RAM and other resources, causing it to swap virtual memory, which is 100x slower than normal when it fits in RAM. Or are you rendering to disk directly? It better be a fast spinning drive and one that's been decluttered/dewormed and defragged LOL

-Philip

welcome to the daily dose... www.thebest3d.com/howler/tutorials/theDailyDose.html

I had an animation render that a client set to his render farm, took almost 4 months to finish using 5 machines, thank the gods I triple checked everything before sending it off. He actually went on 2 vacations before it was done LOL!

I have 4 gigs of ram on a xp-pro 64 bit system.  Dual core AMD 2.4ghz.  720x548 resolution.  This morning it is almost 20 percent at 99 of 481 frames.

how many pixels wide and tall are the frames? What level of subpixel adressing (AA) are you using?

Remember grasshopper, good things come to those who wait, until... you look at the finished prod and say, "what the... I didn't do that"  

It could be a simple bug. I worked ont the river, had that prob, got fed up, shut down, rebooted, and started over, and it rendered in half the time.

@staigermanus:  I am using the highest AA because I cannot use less and still get true ambience as an option.  720x548 frame size.

A storm just came through.

The electricity glitched.

The computer shut down.

GAME OVER!!:b_upset:

I sure wish I could save an animation then re start it later from where it left off.

Sorry to hear that Dan... did you loose your work...

You might want to invest in a power protector..... It's like a big capacitor that keeps feeding the equipment enough juice, during a brownout,  to give you the time to save your work...  

you can, you can stop it where ever you want, take note of time and frame, when you start the next time and you click render animation you just put in where you left off.

Inside the rimor was done in 4 parts, and I put thim in a video editor, corel in this case, and run them together, it becomes seamless. then just save them to your preference, such as .avi. 

you could do it in 10 sec intervals, and put it together, and only you would be the wiser

We're still pushing to get the "resume animation render" function implemented in its been long overdue and wanted since Bryce was invented.

That would be a welcome feature.  I have lowered the AA settings and dispensed with the true ambience.  I have put a light below the drone to simulate true ambience and restarted the render which will now take 22 hours.

The other Bryce Lightning machines will be mostly Pentium 4 - 2.8+Ghz with Hyperthreading.

Once I got it all configured I'm going to compare to my previous benchmark results.

Lightning is like a server, so you open up the file on the slowest machine because all its doing is sending out the packets for the faster machines to render out the tiles, when they're working the "server machine" can be set to render as well.

Quote - A storm just came through.

The electricity glitched.

The computer shut down.

GAME OVER!!:b_upset:

I sure wish I could save an animation then re start it later from where it left off.

You'll have to render it to image sequence. Then you can find the PNG (or whatever format) images you rendered so far, and then render a new sequence starting with that last one. (unless there's veay postrender action that accumulates effects over more prior frames, such as motion trails (ghosting))

 Do you have a Video of the so-far-renered portion? You could extract that into an image sequence to complement what's left to do.

How many frames did it render thus far, but big is the file? Dogwaffle might help extract. WinFF  too, ffmpeg etc... of course as well.

Quote - @staigermanus:  I am using the highest AA because I cannot use less and still get true ambience as an option.  720x548 frame size.

Not sure if that applies to Bryce but sometimes, instead of letting it do subpicel antialiasing, rendering without AA but at higher resolution, like double res, might be faster. And after you resample it to the target final res it may still look almost the same. Of course there's time spent on postwork for resampling, but by splitting it over more than 1 phases you can work around power outages more easily ;-)

Might not work with Bryce though. Try it to find out.

oh by-the-way were rendering this to an AVI or Quicktime or other? And what codec / compressor?

AVI full frames uncompressed.  I add synth to taste in Magix Music Maker outputting from there also full frames uncompressed and do final compositing in Windows Movie Maker.

why uncompressed? So much wasted diskspace, so slow to save and load (disk drive speed is a big bottleneck). You might want to use lossless compression like Lagarith codec, compresses faster than uncompressed writes to disk. (unless perhaps you have solidstate drives ;-)

Lagarith is free and lossless. Yet similar to mp4 - it's a bit like that compression tool, ICEOWS, which is wavelet based but also lossless and thus uuseful for data

Quote - Lightning is like a server, so you open up the file on the slowest machine because all its doing is sending out the packets for the faster machines to render out the tiles, when they're working the "server machine" can be set to render as well.

I recall the option for the host to render at the same time as the client machines was removed after version 5.5 is that back now?

should still be there, will check, we also use to be able to render across the net even between PC and Mac....interesting.

Quote - why uncompressed? So much wasted diskspace, so slow to save and load (disk drive speed is a big bottleneck). You might want to use lossless compression like Lagarith codec, compresses faster than uncompressed writes to disk. (unless perhaps you have solidstate drives ;-)

Lagarith is free and lossless. Yet similar to mp4 - it's a bit like that compression tool, ICEOWS, which is wavelet based but also lossless and thus uuseful for data

I am definitely going to have to check that out.  I use uncompressed video until the last step in the process to preserve as much as possible.  Working in several steps between apps, I do not want to lose a litte each step along the way.

Exactgly Dan, when I do for production quality work compression is set to none, if its for the web I use mpg4.

I'm getting a mac soon. will i be able to use lightning between that and my old pc? Sorry If i lost sommething here! :lol:

Yes but I think there are some lil buggers right now that need some tweaking, but it should work fine.

Quote - Exactgly Dan, when I do for production quality work compression is set to none, if its for the web I use mpg4.

Lagarith codec presents the best of both worlds: lossless, yet good compression ratio (and speed - very important!)

http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

by-the-way, we're giving away PD Pro 3.5 for a few days:  (which can also load AVI and image sequences and do your postwork :-)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8120854/pdPro35/%28%20I%20like%20to%20waffle%20%29PD_Pro3_5_Install.zip

This is the full installer of PD Pro 3.5 - congrats users of PD Artist and PD
Particles, you've earned it! (ok, and users of the free version 1.2.... you're
the lucky winners :-)

The trick is that you need an extraction key. And here's the key:

Ilikemywafflescrispy

This is the same I think we had here years ago. Not the latest, still great for starters..... we're considering bringing the newest versions (PD Pro 5 and PD Howler) to 'rosity. Stay tuned.

If you don't remember the coolest things that were added in v3.5, 3.6 and 3.7
(free updates beyond PD Pro 3.5), check
http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/whatsnew

The 3.7 update is at http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/patches

If you have PD Artist you can leave it on the same system, as PD Pro will
normally install in a different default folder. But don't run them at the same
time, as they use the same server connection.

If you use PD Particles, you can also install on the same and you should even be
able to run them at the same time I think since they use a different connection.

(test and tell me wrong :-)

Happy 4th of July everyone! and happy waffling!

True but you still lose image quality, there's no way around it, every compressed scene loses even if it says "lossless" it still gets degraded.

Quote - True but you still lose image quality, there's no way around it, every compressed scene loses even if it says "lossless" it still gets degraded.

you are mistaken there my friend.

Exzmples: runlength encoding does not stand a chance of loosing data.

It also is not very efficient for certain types of videos but still, it's completely lossless. There is such a thing.

Even wavelet based compression can be successfully used with lossless constraints. For example Iceows has implement their algorithm. It's similar in concept to some basic wavelet based spectral compression and analysis, from the little I read about it. But with the difference that it forces the data to not loose any detail. Which is why it's possibly to use it as a data compression solution in the first lace (like zip, gzip, 7zip and others...). Totally lossless.

then again I'm blabbering about theory here, I don't know if Lagarith actually falls into this category, they sure claim so, and seeing how Iceows did the same, although focusing on data compression rather than video, I know it can be done. Have you ever compressed a 'video' with iceows and compared the size with zip?

I've been video editing for over 20 years, I was on the stoop of when they first came out with compression codecs, agreed some things have changed but not much as far as your application that renders out what you want options. Over the years I've learned just to do none on compression and let the clients edit it in the way they want then if it looks cruddy it isn't my fault LOL!!!

you're talking about 2 different compression things here, I can compress a video with the codec, then save the file as a .zip and compress it to a smaller size for transfer across the net or for download ( zipping a file up has no impact on the file degradation thats the codec inm the application)etc, those are totally different things.

Quote - you're talking about 2 different compression things here, I can compress a video with the codec, then save the file as a .zip and compress it to a smaller size for transfer across the net or for download ( zipping a file up has no impact on the file degradation thats the codec inm the application)etc, those are totally different things.

so what's to prevent a codec to do the same from within?

Look, just try it. take a short video, save it to any codec that's know to be lossy. Thena lso save it to Lagarith.

Then pick any of the frames and compare it to the same frame from the other codec save.

Do a diff, a divide, or whatever you want to have it highlight the difefrences between the original and the lagarith version of the frame. No difference - blacnk white (or black, mdepending on the operation)

In fact Dogwaffle can do that pixel-for-pixel comparison for you :-)

Photoshop too, just layer two frames, one the original and the other the decoded one from a compressed video.  Make the layers a modification layer that subtracts or divides or other types of operations that enhance differences.

I guess a quick lua script could also run through all pixels and detect if there's any difference before and after.

I was referring to iceows as an example because it uses an algo approach that's used in mpeg or other codecs. And yet it is lossless.

Compression of a file is different from video compression is what I'm saying.

yes of course it is (can be) different. But that doesn't mean you can't use the file compression algorithms or concepts and techniques in codecs. In the end it's all a stream of data.

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Thats really irritating!