Build your own render farm

Don't let your old PCs gather dust - turn them into a powerful render network instead. Our starter guide tells you everything you need to know

We all need all the power we can get when rendering large images or animations. And most of us have old computers knocking around the house or office. So why not use them to build your own render network?

Our guide to setting up your own render farm, originally published with issue 94 of 3D World, shows you everything you need to know, from basic network structure to choosing a render queue manager.

The article also includes a complete step-by-step guide to setting up network for free with Blender and Farmerjoe.

You can download the article in PDF format below. Once you‘ve mastered the basics, check out issue 121 of 3D World, which includes 10 tips for streamlining your network structure to boost the efficiency of your farm.

Download the article here

Behind the Voices Behind Up

In this post I’ll be passing along another one of those Pixarian stories I love so much: It’s great that critics have been praising Up for its story and for its phenomenal voice talent!

The latter is thanks to people behind the sound booth such as Pixarian Amera Rizk. After all, in an animated film actors are the cherry on top. For example, whenever I come back from a screening of Up I always think to myself, "Ed Asner and Jordan Nagai portrayed Carl and Russell perfectly!" On the other hand, while I’m watching the film it’s the character of Carl Fredricksen, not Asner, I’m thinking of.

Pittsburgh’s Tribune Total Media sat down with former local Amera Rizk who is currently working behind the booth for Pixar. In the article, she talks about how lucky she was to be working with legendary actors, her reaction to the tremendously positive reception Up has had and, of course, how her persistent nature got her to the studio. It’s a very interesting read for casual fans but most of all for those waiting for inspiration.

At Pixar, Rizk was the second assistant editor on Up, previously working on Cars, currently working on Cars 2.

800 TFLOP real-time ray tracing GPU unveiled, not for gamers

A Japanese company has announced an ambitious new system that uses what is essentially a complex, 45nm ray-tracing GPU to accelerate real-time ray traced rendering. The target market is automotive design, and, unfortunately for any gamers who might fantasize about one day using for games, it's likely to stay confined to that niched forever.

A Japanese company has announced a massive, 800 teraflop real-time ray tracing (RTRT) system that gangs together nine, 73-core chips into a single system that fits inside a desktop computer form factor. The new chip, which is being jointly developed with Toyota and Unisys, is aimed at the auto industry, where designers will use it to prototype body designs and paint combinations.

As for how this system works, there are currently only two sources of information: a Japanese description on the website of the chip's maker, TOPS Systems Corporation, and a Nikkei article in English that's presumably a summary of the Japanese original. Given the paucity of information and the relative shallowness of my technical knowledge of ray tracing, I'll give my best shot at explaining this system and putting it in context, and I'll invite others to weigh in with more info in the comments thread.

As I noted above, the overall system consists of nine identical, 45nm ASICs ganged together via some unspecified interconnect scheme. Each individual ASIC consists of nine compute clusters connected to one another through a shared bus. (See this excellent diagram from Nikkei.) This bus also hosts a 64-bit RISC master controller that presumably takes in work in batches and assigns it to the other eight cores, which then do the grunt work of computing the rays; there are also I/O and memory interfaces attached to this shared bus, which link the chip to the rest of the system.

There are a few things that are interesting about these clusters, one of which is pictured below. First, you'll notice that each cluster is made of eight heterogeneous cores, each of which is supposed to handle on part of the ray tracing algorithm.

A single computer cluster.

The heterogeneous cores are connected by a high-bandwidth, three-bus link (system bus, data bus, and instruction bus), which lets a job move in stages from one core to the next. Clearly, this is a pipeline setup, with one core per stage, and in this respect the ASIC is very much a ray-tracing GPU—analogous to the fixed-function GPUs of yesteryear, which had custom hardware blocks dedicated to each stage of the rasterization pipeline.

The fact that this is a ray-tracing GPU has very important implications for the part's future in gaming. To wit, it has no such future. But more on that in a moment.

The second interesting thing about this system is that it addresses RTRT as a compute problem, instead of as a data management problem like the much less ambitious Caustic Graphics solution. You'll recall that Caustic's solution relies on the traditional GPU to do the computational heavy lifting, with the Caustic board accelerating the data lookup part of the problem. The TOPS design, in contrast, is more traditional brute force, multicore plus caches solution whose main novel twist is this one-core-per-pipeline-stage idea.

There's a reason that the other plans for a hardware-based RTRT solution have been homogeneous multicore designs that throw bandwidth and highly parallel math hardware at the problem, and that's the fact that you can actually repurpose a homogeneous design for other applications in different verticals, thereby gaining the sales volume needed to make producing the IC profitable. This brings me to the reason why you shouldn't plan on using a successor to this chip in a computer game.

Don't count on ever buying one of these for your PC

It seems like ages ago since Intel jumped on the real-time ray-tracing bandwagon, flogging the rendering technique as the inevitable successor of conventional rasterization techniques for generating video game graphics. But this turned out to be a classic case of a lot of smoke but no real fire, as the graphics community pushed back fairly hard against the RTRT hype (some of which I admit to falling for), with many arguing for the eventual dominance of a hybrid rasterization/RTRT approach.

In a nutshell, unless you really need to see an accurate representation of the way that a particular paint shade looks on a surface in different lighting conditions, it's not clear that an RT-only approach will ever have an advantage over rasterization for real-time rendering. Actually, it would be more accurate for me to say that people whose opinions I trust on all things graphical are very insistent that RT-only will never supplant rasterization for either real-time or offline rendering in non-industrial-design contexts, while the advocates of "RT everywhere" are in the minority. (I hate having to "report the controversy" like a journalist, but that's the only responsible thing for me to do here.)

So given that this new ASIC is a very ambitious, complex design that will be fabricated at the current 45nm process node, it will be quite expensive. And given that the only possible use of this extremely expensive, boutique ASIC is to accelerate ray tracing—a rendering technique whose commercial prospects outside of the narrow market of industrial design are debatable—there doesn't seem to be any way that this product can achieve enough volume to come down in price. This means that the TOPS part will always be a boutique item intended for a very specific, relatively small vertical, and all of its customers will pay through the nose for it into perpetuity—sort of like the SGI workstations of old, but worse.

There's a chance that the much cheaper Caustic RTRT solution could come down in price enough to pass the "what the heck, I'll buy one" threshold and create a mass market for RTRT, in which case there may eventually be premium niche for an RTRT GPU to fill. But that's too many "what if's" strung together to make anything but the most hypothetical case for an eventual TOPS-derived RTRT mass-market GPU.

21 insider tips to enhance your career in 3D

What distinguishes a merely excellent 3D artist from a studio‘s key team member? To answer the question, we asked leading games, VFX and architectural facilities to nominate their most valuable players – then pressed the nominees for their tips for standing out from your peers within the industry

Industrial Light & Magic

www.ilm.com

The Expert: David Meny
Position: Digital Production Supervisor



TIP #1 - FIGHT FOR MORE RESOURCES
Give your staff as many resources as you can. That means an ample production schedule, artwork and a creative vision they can follow, but also as much machine time as possible. The more iterations an artist can do on a job, the better the work will be. In our facility at ILM, we doubled our proc pool in order to do Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Transformers, Evan Almighty and the new Harry Potter movie, all of which had more or less parallel schedules. Even with those extra resources, it was pretty challenging – but without them, it would have been a nightmare.

TIP #2 - EMBRACE MAJOR CHANGES
Don‘t be afraid to make fundamental changes to your way of working. At ILM, we had a watershed year [in 2005] with War of the Worlds and The Island, when we went from NURBS to subdivision surfaces like the rest of the industry. It was a big transition, because it wasn‘t just our software that had changed: it was the modelling fundamentals. As a result, we also had re-learn our approaches to rendering, look development and texturing. But it wasn‘t as difficult as I feared it would be because the underlying concepts are the same: it‘s just a different approach.

TIP #3 - KEEP AN EYE ON COMPETITORS
When you‘re at the cutting edge of visual effects, you can never feel comfortable. Keep learning new skill sets. Keep an eye on the different software that is being developed. And continue watching the work that other facilities are doing. Even the biggest studios have to keep up with the industry.

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

eu.playstation.com

The Expert: Lee Carus
Position: CG Supervisor



TIP #4 - PLAY TO TEAM MEMBERS' STRENGTHS
When I rejoined Sony, I was handed a group of very talented individuals, but they weren‘t really a team. My first task was to get them all pulling in the same direction, so I set them off on a project that required no CG but which made sure that they all worked together. By deconstructing the team, I discovered what people really wanted to do and what their latent skills were. For example, I found I had an extremely talented concept artist who had been labouring over polygon modelling, which he really didn‘t enjoy. Sometimes it‘s not about art: it‘s about making sure you‘re getting the best out of the people you have.

TIP #5 - WHEN IN TROUBLE, BRING IN NEW BLOOD
Many moons ago, I was brought in to troubleshoot a PlayStation game called Colony Wars. It had been burning money for over a year and really wasn‘t going anywhere. The fi rst task was to re-establish some form of art direction, but since we didn‘t have time to do a full-on creative bible, we had to go for a high-turnaround plan/do/review process – not ideal by any means. Nevertheless, within a couple of months of myself, a new producer and star graphics coder coming on board, marketing started to take notice. From the ashes of a project leaking money, we turned Colony Wars into a million-seller.

TIP #6 - WORSHIP THE GLITCH...
One night when I was working late on the cinematic for the original Wipeout, the fax machine bleeped into life. [Legendary design agency] The Designers Republic had been brought in to work on the styling for the packshot, but it was the header on their coversheet that really interested me. I quickly scanned it in and mapped it onto the side of the Wipeout ship – it had a grainy quality that was exactly what I was looking for! The studio heads and marketing took a look the next day and from this point TDR‘s involvement snowballed. This generated a huge amount of positive PR for us and I‘d like to think helped Wipeout to become established as one of the first ‘cool‘ games out there.

Blur Studio

www.blur.com

The Expert: Dave Wilson
Position: Senior CG Supervisor



TIP #7 - BUILD A BALANCED TEAM
While tasks like lighting, art direction and solving technical challenges are pretty straightforward – and obviously necessary if you‘re the CG Supervisor – it‘s the less obvious skill sets that often reap the greatest rewards. One of the most important pieces of advice that I can offer is to give artists enough freedom to bring their own ideas and creativity to the table while keeping the project consistent. Nobody wants to be just a pair of hands. Someone much smarter than me told me once that great supervisors surround themselves with artists better than themselves. I try to do that as much as possible. They inspire me to lead them to the best of my ability.

TIP #8 - REMEMBER TO DELEGATE
As much as I love to lead by example and put in the extra effort to make each project the best that it can be, I‘ve realised that balance is key. It‘s very important to delegate responsibility, not only because it helps the team to feel like they‘re invested in each project, but because it helps me focus my strengths where they can make the most signifi cant impact. Maintaining an enjoyable working process for each project is vital. It‘s all about longevity: keeping teams happy, healthy and with you for the long haul.

TIP #9 - USE PRE–VIZ AS A MOTIVATIONAL TOOL
Lately, I have been trying to put as much effort as I can into the pre-viz work at Blur. I‘ve found that starting out on a project with great storyboards, concept art and an awesome animatic really sets the pace for the project. This pre-planning and anticipation helps alleviate any hiccups that might crop up throughout production. But almost as importantly, I‘ve found that having a really kick-ass, adrenaline-pumping animatic not only gets our clients excited about their project, but gets the team geared up too.

Smoothe

www.smoothe.co.uk

The Expert: Robin Lawrie
Position: Head of Animation



TIP #10 - MISUSE TOOLS TO YOUR ADVANTAGE
I get a real kick from using tools in ways they were not initially intended. One recent example was a project that required extensive use of moving objects and light sources. Obviously, in cases like this, Global illumination is problematic: you either face huge render times or noisy sequences. But one characteristic of the noise in GI is that it is essentially random, whereas the changes in lighting in a scene occur over many frames, as a light or object moves in space. By using the wonderful, scriptable V-Ray, we were able to calculate the lighting for each frame at average quality levels, before blending the solutions with those of the frames on either side. The end result was much reduced GI noise, and consequently lower frame times.

Aardman Animations

www.aardman.com

The Expert: Bram Ttwheam
Position: Senior Compositor, Commercials CG Dept.



TIP #11 - FORGET ABOUT PHOTOREALISM
While much film and advertising work is grounded in reality, nine times out of ten, photorealism is a creatively redundant pursuit. In my experience, the most rewarding work has very little to do with the real world. If you‘re lucky enough to find yourself working with a talented director or designer, do your best to accommodate their vision, no matter what it entails. Don‘t be afraid to throw any sympathetic technique available to you at a project, no matter how intangible it may seem. If you‘re lucky, you may just stumble across something fresh and exciting. Of course, you may just stumble… but hey, it‘s always worth the risk!

TIP #12 - FINE–TUNE IN THE COMPOSITE
You can do far more work in the composite then you may at first suspect, and it‘s a brilliant way to work. You can spend a long time fiddling around with shaders in 3D to achieve something that is actually quite straightforward in the comp. If you‘re doing effects, or even using particles, you may well get superior results this way, as it is simply more intuitive.

Ghost

www.ghost.dk

The Expert: Martin Gårdeler
Position: VFX Supervisor and Studio Co-Founder



TIP #13 - USE REAL ELEMENTS WHERE YOU CAN
The human eye is very sensitive to ‘fake‘ things. However, if you put one small ‘real‘ thing in your shot, like a filmed texture, your eyes accept the rest of the image more easily. For example, for a recent Tuborg beer commercial, we had to simulate beer pouring into invisible containers. But we only had two weeks of production time, and fluid simulation is notoriously difficult to get right. I used a relatively simple RealFlow simulation for the pouring motion, defining the bottle. Then I decided that the only way to make the shot look right was to get something real in there – like filling up a mid-size aquarium with beer and filming it! And that‘s pretty much what we did. The live-action plates were mapped onto the simulated fl uid, and the whole shot was comped together with CG bottles revealing their real counterparts.

Double Negative

www.dneg.com

The Expert: Martin Parsons
Position: Head of Creature Development



TIP #14 - LOOK FOR REUSABLE SOLUTIONS
It pays to think long-term when tackling short-term issues. When solving a problem in the present, think how your solution could help you in the future. On my first project at Double Negative, Batman Begins, I set up Batman‘s rig in such a way that it forms the basis for all the rigs we use today. This means no time is wasted, no thought processes are repeated; all intellectual activity is spent on improving, rather than re-doing.

TIP #15 - DRAW ON NON–CG SOURCES
Deadlines permitting, avoid working excessive hours. This helps to keep the mind fresh, leaving fertile ground for new ideas. I find that time walking around art galleries, cooking or just gazing out the window can help to yield solutions to knotty problems. Not all problems have technical solutions; much can be done by craft and artistry. Velázquez and Rodin‘s later styles show us that what is important is what the viewer sees, not the meticulous representation of detail. Understand what it is you are trying to convey.

Animal Logic

www.animallogic.com

The Expert: Emmanuel Blasset
Position: 3D Lead



TIP #16 - USE DETAILS TO SELL A SHOT
In Happy Feet, there was something about transitioning between above and below the waterline that never felt quite right, especially in the leopard seal sequence: the shot where Mumble gets thrown off a little berg by a giant beast and falls into the sea. We were in need of a high-tech solution: a clean Pyrex dish filled with water rested against a black shirt while we blew air through a straw from one side and took photos from the other with a digital camera. It was only used for five frames – blink and you‘ll miss it – but it made the transition work.

A52

www.a52.com

The Expert: Andy Hall
Position: VFX Supervisor and Head of 3D



TIP #17 - TAKE AN INTEREST IN NON–CG CREATIVES
A lot of CG professionals only take an interest in their own little part of a job, but it‘s vital to know the industry from an agency point of view as well as a production or post-production standpoint. Look out for which director did which job, which DP shot which spot, and which agency they worked with. This gives you an appreciation for the bigger picture and makes you much more aware of opportunities, industry trends and work to aspire to.

TIP #18 - OBSERVE HOW PEOPLE COMMUNICATE
If you get to go on set, study how the director transmits his or her vision and why they choose to shoot things in certain way. When you‘re working with a supervisor, consider whether their interactions with the client and the team best serves the job. Being a great artist is as much about observing other people as it is about technical skills: if you can gain an insight into how a director or agency works, it will make your interaction on a job much more rewarding – and, as a result, successful.

Blitz Games

www.blitzgames.com

The Expert: Steve Thomson
Position: Art Direction Manager



TIP #19 - GET INVOLVED IN TRAINING COLLEAGUES
Because the industry is now moving so quickly, the process of creating new assets takes a lot of research. I joined our technology team over a year ago to help shape our next-gen tools. But on top of helping to craft the tools, artists need to be involved in making sure the other staff know how to get the most out of them. We‘ve been actively supporting the Blitz Academy, our internal peer-to-peer training solution. Helping to train other staff means developing your skills in a new direction, and can be a big challenge – but ultimately, it‘s a necessary and very rewarding one.

DreamWorks

www.dreamworksanimation.com

The Expert: Matt Baer
Position: Head of Effects



TIP #20 - BREAK LARGE TASKS INTO MODULES
For the sequence in Madagascar in which Marty the zebra surfs on dolphins, I and three other effects artists assigned to the shot broke down the elements we had to create in a modular way. This enabled us to combine them into a single comp in which they would all appear to interact properly, even though many elements were dependent on others. We built it in such a way that it allowed for both a combined comp and temp comps that only contained the elements we wanted comments on. This allowed for immediate feedback on each artist‘s contribution as well as the overall shot.

TIP #21 - REMEMBER: CODERS ARE YOUR FRIENDS
Don‘t be afraid of talking to programmers. I owe much of what I know today about CG to my co-workers at Wavefront: if I ever had a question about the renderer, I could walk down the hall and get a half-hour explanation of how and why it worked in a certain way. Wavefront was a very collaborative company and I really appreciated those who would share time in this way.

Are you an industry-insider? Share your tips in the comments below, or join our other members in the 3D World forum.

This article first appeared in Issue 92 of 3D World magazine.

For more expert knowledge read 3D World magazine each month. You‘ll find our latest subscription offers and back issues available to order at www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk.

Voice-O-Matic v3 has been announced

Registered users of Voice-O-Matic v2 that purchased after May 15, 2009 and/or users currently subscribed to one of the yearly support packages (Premium+, VIP) will be eligible to receive Voice-O-Matic v3 free of charge.


Read More:http://di-o-matic.com/products/plugins/VoiceOMatic/update.html

Finalists of the 2009 Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge have been announced

http://www.atom.com/spotlights/starwars/challenge/

Ubisoft opening up a new studio in Toronto.

Video game developer Ubisoft is coming to Toronto as part of a deal with the Ontario government that will create 800 jobs over 10 years.

Premier Dalton McGuinty and Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat say Ubisoft will establish a major video game studio in the city with the help of a $263-million investment over 10 years from the provincial government.

Ubisoft will itself invest more than $500 million in the new studio, set to begin operations before the end of the year.

Ontario has been trying to attract tech-based, creative industries as part of its plan to offset the loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector.

In May, pop superstar Elton John jointed McGuinty to announce a $23-million investment by the province in Toronto's Starz Animation Studio, which specializes in high-end computer-animated films.

French-based Ubisoft, which employs 2,200 people in Quebec and has more than half its global video game production workforce in that province, is one of the world's largest video game publishers.

It established a presence in Vancouver earlier this year.

Ubisoft has created games such as Tom Clancy's "Rainbow Six" and "Prince of Persia."

Ontario has a digital media industry that generates about $1 billion a year.

Lightbulb Box Office Buzz: Becoming Pixar's 2nd Highest Grossing Movie is Simply Keeping Up! I’m going to start off this edition of Box Office Buzz w

I’m going to start off this edition of Box Office Buzz with Up‘s latest huge accomplishment.

The movie about and old man who pursued his final dream has now become the second highest grossing Pixar movie surpassing The Incredibles! Those who may not know much about Pixar’s box office history might be thinking: so what if it’s second, why not first? Well, Pixar’s top grosser is Finding Nemo (2003) with $339 million, that would be the fifteenth highest grossing movie ever and the second highest grossing animated movie ever. Otherwise known as a near impossible goal to reach.

So maybe Up is just second, but with over $264 million dollars (Pixar’s 10th blockbuster in a row) one could say that’s more than enough! That’s not to say I want Pixar’s 10th film to stall, the studio’s movies are known for having "legs" and long ones too. After passing The Incredibles and becoming the #6 animated movie/#5 CGI movie Up still has one more feasible goal to reach, beating Shrek’s $267 million at the U.S. box office. That would make Up the second highest grossing non-sequel animated movie ever!

Anyways, this is how the Independence Day Weekend played out. Friday raked in $2.7 million, the Fourth of July brought in $1.8 million and finally on Sunday $2.0 million was earned. That gets Up’s estimated domestic gross up to $264,873,000! Considering Ice Age 3 and Transformers 2 (both with huge potential to break into Up’s market) are present and strong this weekend, it’s impressive how well Pete Docter’s second film is holding on.

Speaking of big summer films, Transformers has taken over the ranks of #1 film of the year leaving Up at #2. But I think Pixar would rather have a $264 million film with the best reviews of the year than a confusing explosion of a movie… I wonder what those analysts think about that? Sorry, I had to.
Actuals coming very soon so stick around!