Is voting going to close sometime this year or...

Been almost 2 weeks now folks.

I wonder why the maximum size image is 2000 X 2000 in 3D/Animation but in 2D/Photography it is only 800 X 800 (the old maximum spec)?

Thanks!  Landscapes have always been my passion.  Too bad I'm not so good at envisioning and creating 3D ones in Vue.

Thank you!

Thanks for featuring my image! :biggrin:

I'll try changing the workgroup settings.  Right now I'm rendering a Vue scene.  I've done some test renders with some of the sample scenes that come with Vue 8.  My new rig renders 2.5 to over 3 times faster than the old one and without the crashing problem. :biggrin:

Well, I've done it.  I put together my system Friday night, Saturday morning.  It's working pretty well.  I've run some comparitive tests in Vue 8 between my old PC and the new and the new is rendering between 2.5 to 3 times faster.  The only problem I'm having so far is that I can't render scenes in Lux with the GPU.  I get a runtime error.  I got those GTS 450 cards and have them in SLI mode.  I have the latest drivers so that's not the problem.  Lux renders just fine with the CPU.

Quote - Drats! I had a nice, long list of goodies for you and tried to cap it off with a big smiley. Somehow that closed my window.

Quick recap: Get as much memory as you can. Those large rez renders eat memory, as does any amount of massive scene building you care to indure. The extra buffer space never hurts.

I'm an AMD backer myself since my first 350mhz screamer . For the money, you just can't beat them. Their FX 8 core series is top dog right now, though when I built my current rig, the 1090T Black was the fastest CPU. And I whole heartly vouch for watercooling if you're planning on doing the type of renders you spoke about. It's just silly not to get the extra protection for your components and have the peace of mind that you won't have a melt down. With my little office off the back of our house, it gets to around 92* when its 108 outside. With my little window unit blasting, it'll come down to 80 or so, but even with my rig on full load, the CPU has never eclipsed 38C.

On your video card, you'll definitely want to upgrade. I've always liked nvidia, which is also prime with all the GPU-rendering goodies if you go that route eventually. I specifically went with an Asus mobo with SLI to run two of the cheaper GTS450's which were equivalant to the GTX480, and cheaper still by about a c-note. Lux isn't quite there yet, but when they get that mode sorted out, I'll be glad of the extra horsepower.

Anyway, rambling on, you seem technically sorted from your above poke into the monitor. Next time you boot up, check your bios to see what your max temps are safeguarded at. If you're crashing and suspect it's heat, that would be my first check, as well as what Sharky mentioned about your fans. I clean my screens out/off once a month due to dog hair and whatnot that tracks through here. PC Probe can do it realtime as well if you have it.

Have fun with that build, and come visit us in the Reality thread in between!

I'm adding to my official wishlist now.  How about 2  GeForce GTS 450 cards running in SLI with an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard and an AMD FX 8150 processor?  32GB RAM and a solid state drive with windows and maybe VUE and DS installed on it?

Quote - Hello krickerd,

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don't forget that there is Octane, first renderer which uses the GPU, to some degree Lux is also using it. So get a good CUDA-capable nvidia GPU and you could benefit finaly from this high-end GPUs. To my knowledge no other renderers uses the GPU, do they?

I'm wondering since years why consumer gpus are almost only used for gaming. They could do much more than that. Not that much like nvidias Quadro or Tesla. In my opinion they're wasting potential power and performance.

Thanks for the link.  Looks very impressive but not compatable with DS or Vue so not something I'm interested in right now.  It's difficult to keep up with technology.  Always something better coming out.

Looks like I figured out what the problem was.  I had 2 terrain mats with global transparancy driven by a function.  I used this because it was used in the tutorial I was following.  However in my scene it caused black holes in the terrain.  So the simple solution is to simply turn it off which is fine by me.  I'm happy with the scene without it on.

Seeing as I'm a technician, you'd think I'd have figured this out in less time.  It was deceiving though because the holes were not very apparant unless rendered at higher quality and at larger sizes.

Quote - I take it you used ecosystems in this scene ?  

Go to the materials tab and look under Ecosystem Materials (it's usually at the bottom of the list).  Go through those materials and make sure they're all showing correctly.  

I seem to recall having this happen a few years ago and it was one material that was causing it.

It has something to do with solid growth plants and how they cast shadows.  The shadow itself is not calculated as a shadow but as black artifacts.  Sometimes the screen goes black at the end of the render until "auto-exposure" is unchecked.  However if I use any transparent object such as Big Brader's tree-like objects, there is no problem.  Also if I add a SG tree as an object there is no problem.  There is something wrong in this scene with the ecosystems that causes shadows to equal black only.  I am using a proceedural terrain with a simple material with 8 layers, 2 of those layers are ecosystems.

Quote - Your crashing on cpu intensive stuff probably has it's root issue in heat.  Crack the case open and make sure your cpu fan and heatsink are nice and free from dust and the other assorted crap that gets sucked into your computer.  That's just a short term fix though.  I have a phenom quad core too(9800gtx) that just plain doesn't cut it anymore.   The twin core in my wife's laptop renders faster than this thing.  So, I know how you feel with the whole issue. 

I have been monitoring the CPU temp during rendering and none of the cores gets above 51C.  Also since monitoring, I haven't seen a crash, including letting a render go for 23 hours.  I did notice during that render that my memory usage got up to about 97% early on.  I was wondering if DAZ Studio was allowing the system to run out of memory.

Regarding one of my monitors, I discovered that 2 of the capacitors in the power supply have popped.  I found replacement power supplies new on ebay for $21, so I ordered one.  If that fixes the problem, it will save me about $79

Thanks for the tips.  I'm monitoring and logging my CPU core temperatures and RAM usage right now during a long render to see if there are any anomolies before a crash.  So far so good.  I also found out one of my monitors is bad.  I may take it apart and see if any problem is obvious.

Interesting website.  A lot of work went into that.  I just wish the pictures in the slideshow were larger, the text is hard to read.

Quote - To get that "feel" of that render LuxRender would probably be the best bet.

 

Yes but displacement in Reality does not work well in my experience.