I love rendering with no materials at the moment... Going through a minimalist phase obviously.

Just wanted to share :)

I had big plans for a 2011 showreel, but of course no-one ever gets time to work on their own marketing material, and much of my favorite work is hidden for all time under a stack of non-disclosure agreements which I vaguely remember signing.

I produced a completely original* piece of music for the showreel, which I came across while cleaning up the projects drive.

* Strictly speaking, there was one sample in there:

I talked at Cornerhouse (Manchester) on Saturday afternoon as part of their 'Show & Tell' series.

I could have spent some time putting together a relevant and interesting presentation with some kind of point, but instead (of course) I left it until a few hours before to throw together some unrelated slides featuring a polaroid of me on the verge of tears at age 3, some stickman doodles, and various other sketchy evidence of stuff I've done the last couple of years.

I found it liberating to be allowed to talk about my inane activities as though they had some creative or artistic merit, and was touched by the number of people going 'awwwwww' and looking sorry for me when stickmen came on screen.

Many thanks to Design by Day for recommending me to talk, and to Cornerhouse for the chance to participate, I highly recommend getting involved if you have the chance.

PS - I now have man flu, and have only moped around and grumbled at 100% of everyone I have come into contact since its official diagnosis yesterday. I cannot pass up this opportunity to let others know that they are not alone, and it will all be okay someday.

I must say the word 'rendering' more times on a daily basis than the whole rest of the world's population put together. It's a huge bottleneck in the 3D production process, and I just love talking about it. I failed A-Level maths because I was spending time with my friend making daisy chains and talking about the universe, but I've proven that such qualifications are completely redundant when you have approaching 80 CPUs in a one man(/boy) studio.

Renderboy is now up and running as a service for other Cinema 4D production houses, freelancers, etc. to use on a bargain priced subscription basis... Send your rendering to us via FTP and get on with your work!

See http://www.renderboy.co.uk for a few more details; though it's basically just a huge amount of computing power making lots of noise and generating atomic-blast levels of heat.

Happy rendering, and kids, don't forget to completely avoid A-Level maths lessons and chase girls round instead.

x

Worked up this as an idea for animating our logo for the 2011 showreel... Looks unlikely time will allow a showreel to make it into production this year, but I thought it looked okay.

I really needed some freelance specific business cards:

Composited on this photo I took earlier the same day:

Pimpin' ain't easy...

I upgraded one of our machines with this graphics card. It's essentially an nVidia GTX570. A card... for gamers. This machine was previously running a 460, which compared to most 3D people I've come across, was quite good.

So, why bother upgrading your video card? [Important note: I don't spend money unneccessarily, I don't gain anything from the experience of owning nice computer hardware - it's just a tool].

Render Times

It will not improve render times. Cinema 4D's 'full' mode rendering, which is the typical output mode giving full visual quality, is processed via complex maths on the computer's CPU. It is NOT affected by the graphics card in the machine which is doing the rendering.

(An aside...)

More recently I've started outputting hardware renders to show clients how I see an animation developing. They look essentially like your editor view (so, very rough visual quality), and will scare your clients to death because inevitably they will be unable to mentally separate the 'motion' from the 'look'. It is good, however, to try and align your client with the same process you have to work through to produce their animation to avoid having to build every single preview and potentially post-produce over and over again in order that they can easily digest what you are showing them.

Hardware renders are very fast to produce, and they are done using the video card's hardware, so your graphics card will affect things here. However, they are typically so quickly rendered on almost any modernish card that the time saving benefit is negligable.

If you want to speed up your renders, you need CPU power, preferably multiple machines on a net render - it is the biggest crime in the world to be trying to do you day's work with a big render chugging away in the background on the same machine, slowing your computer to a grinding halt and making your workday less efficient. Your time is more valuable than CPU time. At the very minimum get a second box to use as a dumb render box which can be left on 24 hours working its way through a queue, then when you are not working at your main computer, run the net render client on there too to get it helping out with the rendering overnight.

Editor Use

Where a better graphics card does offer improvements is in your editor view. When you are sitting there, spinning round your 100,000,000 polygon scene and the whole thing is degrading itself to box outlines, or (the most irritating thing EVER), just sitting there seemingly doing nothing for 30 seconds after you try to open a scene while it processes all the polygons... That's your graphics card's limitations showing.

The other thing is often playing back animation in the editor will be of low FPS, in complex scenes with the 'All Frames' option on, C4D can reduce your frame rate as far as it needs, often less than 1 frame per second. Useless for assessing timing and feel of your animation. You can disable 'All Frames' and C4D will try its best to maintain real-time by skipping frames, so you end up with a slightly more accurately timed, jerky animation to watch.

These are things which get in the way of your day... All day, every day, your graphics card is failing you, limiting you.

Cost Effectiveness

If you are just starting in business and aren't busy, it might be fine to piss about wasting time being strangled by your own hardware. Your budget for upgrades is possibly nothing. If you are 'lucky' then your thirst for working on more complex scenes will be slower than those asked for by clients (i.e. you'll be getting paid for less complex work which you can do efficiently enough on your existing hardware).

However, the moment you have to regularly work a longer-than-normal work day, feel consistently anxious about looming deadlines, or start noticing you are waiting round for the computer all the time, it is time to streamline your operation.

I charge 'a certain amount' per day. While it might seem a good idea to be cheap, because obviously all decisions are made on price, so you'll get more work (that's sarcastic by the way), bear in mind your overheads aren't zero just because you are working out of your bedroom on a computer you already own. You need to forward plan for your future business development, and factor this in to your pricing.

3D people need higher spec hardware than any of the other creative industries I know of. If you want to be good, or at least better, then you are probably going to need better hardware.

That's all I can write about this for now... My point is, never hesitate at upgrading if you sense your existing setup is costing you even 30 minutes of waiting-around-for-the-computer time per day.

I wanted some photos of the inside of our studio, so that people knew we had all dat pimped-out hardware n shiz, and to share the joy of our place with the world... Or at least the 3 people who actually read this blog (thanks for the add mum!).

There was a slight problem, in that the studio is very narrow, and long. Taking photos in there even with a decent wide-angle wasn't going to be pretty... So, as everyone knows a fish eye's view of the world is far better than reality anyway, I got hold of a Samyang 8mm Fisheye, which you can get with the respective fitment for all of the leading (still) camera brands.

You can find these for just over £200 new - something I wouldn't have considered worthwhile a few months ago as we do next to no paid still photography work, but since Canon started releasing recent models with HD video capability, having a fisheye on hand for more creative video projects is kind of a bargain at only £200. It would cost thousands, if possible at all, for us to purchase a suitable HD video camera which could accept a fisheye lens. Most cameras at the pricing level a studio our size can feasibly own (rather than the higher spec equipment you would typically rent on a per-project basis), generally don't even have an interchangeable lens - you are stuck with a 72mm filter mount to screw a 0.6 wide angle extra lens onto, costing £300+ and giving such a minimal inprovement in lateral range in reality.

I've posted some photos of our studio, which were quick snaps in low lighting (it was actually dark outside but the camera was set in lamer mode and so auto exposed a long enough exposure to see the blue skies underneath the darkness), and the obligatory 'shot of my dog', to give you an idea of the wild distortion and ultra close focusing (30cm) of this dang thing.

The lens looks like it was designed in communist Russia, and I believe they are made in Poland (though this may not actually be accurate at all), the build quality is extremely solid and it feels like a more expensive piece of glass than it is. It's fully manual, including iris and focus, but I don't bother with any of that stuff, it's pretty much point and shoot left on the widest aperture and a mid-to-short focus distance as the depth of field is so immense due to the short focal length.

I feel I should offer up some kind of mark out of 5 after my mini-review, but let's just say, if I had a choice of keeping the lens, or having my money back, I'd keep the lens.

Developing some neons in 3D... How can you resist making your logo out of light?

I've used Arduino for a while now, for anyone who doesn't know it's an "open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments."

Anyway, that stuff is obvious, but I wanted to create an interesting a better-than-a-piece-of-paper electronic door number. I coupled an Arduino Diecimilia with an LCD117 Kit from Modern Devices to drive a backlit LCD display. The programming I went for is very simple (the studio number is 404), given the time and motivation you could effectively create all forms of animation in a frame-by-frame text character style, but honestly it would look like a 4 year old had been let loose with the crayons.

Though the video shows the Arduino being powered by a USB lead, that is only there to provide DC power to the electronics - the software is running from the ATMega chip on the Arduino board, and it will be powered by a 5v DC adaptor when installed... No computer required beyond the initial programming.

Highly interesting Geeky, I think you'll agree.