They don't make 'em like they used to :(

Always seemed to find myself in strange situations, nice to have it confirmed.

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

Top JCB joyriding action caught by the Islington Mill CCTV last night. Events to note are the hilarious kids on stolen JCB in their ghetto gang dwarfware stalling their ride and the subsequent 'shitting it' reaction of people moving their cars to safe haven inside the courtyard, including myself.

• Radial layout for maximum bandwidth (>50mb/s spirit data)
• Glass finish for minimal ping (~2ms)
• Wireless design
• Guitar pick planchette
• Doubles as handy 'chopping board'

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'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.

So, Cherry keyboards are my favoured brand generally, and the Inifinity is simply the best I've ever found for tactile excitement and overall pleasure. Foolishly they decided to put the mute and volume buttons on exactly the bit of the keyboard where your hand rests if you are someone who can use software correctly and has their fingers resting on hotkeys... The result, constant muting and unmuting of all your computer's sound output, which is highly disabling if you were, for instance, editing video.

Never fear as I turn this worthless piece of junk into a fully functioning keyboard in a few easy steps.

1. Forget unplugging the keyboard, only those people who follow rules would even consider this 'safety' precaution as remotely purposeful.

2. Get a screwdriver and remove all 250 screws from the back of the keyboard. Do not be fooled by their weak camoflauge as there are even more screws under the two frontmost rubber feet and one under the label (your warranty is surely fucked from here on in). Some of the screws are different sizes to others, which is another design flaw as it can cause unnecessary extra work when 'servicing' this keyboard.

3. Split the keyboard open, probably riving the ribbon cable thing out of its connector - do not worry, we're not working with any level of sense or safety here, who cares.

4. Now, you can see the offending workings which reside under the stupid-ass mute and volume buttons. Though I've never had any problems with the volume buttons, their function is related to mute and I HATE THEM ALL. It offends me so much I can't even take a photo with it in focus in its factory state! If you lift up the flimsy flap of button mechanics (it is made of acetate and bubblegum, which will work in our favour in a moment when we do our precision modification work), you can see the offending traces which allow this ridiculous functionality... Using the correct tools (I used some blunt scissors), destroy the tracks ensuring that they can NEVER make contact ever again. Do not simply cut them, but remove a whole chunk of it all.

5. For safety, and to ensure that the now severed and exposed tracks do not short out, possibly even performing the mute operation in an ironic fashion, use tropicalising varnish to coat all exposed track ends and insulate them. We do have tropicalising varnish but instead I used a piece of sellotape on the metal bit underneath as a fine bit of insulation.

6. Reassemble the piece of shit, and enjoy as it is now the best keyboard ever made!

[Prior to performing this hardware modification I did attempt to disable the mute key using various keyboard scan code re-routing/disabling software techniques, none of which worked, and I would recommend this technique as being far more time-effective a solution].

General render network upgrade, rendering used to be code for 'free time', so if time=money you'd think rendering=free money, but strangely not true.

And this was the inside of our old server, not been powered down or cleaned since 2007... mmmmm tasty:

Problem is, when you've started embellishing something with stickers, you are already past the point of no return, and it will continue until it is a freakish mess.