earlye

We deal with this issue a *lot* at ResPower. Here's a tutorial we have for doing this: http://www.respower.com/page_howto_3ds_vray_irradiance And here's one for generating them on our render farm, as opposed to on your computer. Unfortunately, it's not a parallel process yet, but it at least frees up your computer :-) http://www.respower.com/page_howto_3ds_vray_irradiance_farm -- Early Ehlinger, President, ResPower, Inc.

I would say to try to hop across the pond and buy in the US, but all that's built here any more are McMansions. The only remotely affordable land all has covenants requiring you to build one of the designs of the developer. Want something outlandish, modern, or perhaps old-school Victorian? Tough! It would be nice to be able to get several hundred unrestricted acres and start a community for people who want to have custom housing that doesn't suck.

Basically, you create a bitmap with the same aspect ratio as your pool. Make the whole thing grey, and then put some concentric circles of gradients to white and black. Apply to the normal map channel in the material editor, and render. The concentric circles will look like waves radiating from a stone dropped into the water, without requiring any additional geometry. Play with different colors to see what sort of effects you can get out of it. I believe Max can also "bake" the surface normals from a high-resolution model onto a low-resolution model, but I'm not sure how to do it, or where one would look for tutorials.

Take a look at "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand (there's a movie, too, but I can't recommend it as I have not seen it). An architect is not somebody with an architecture degree, but somebody with the vision and integrity to see an architectural project through from beginning to end. Having a degree helps one to become an architect, but isn't a prerequisite.

Why not use texture maps mixed with geometry. For the large swaths of foliage, you could have a "bubble" with leaves and the like over another "bubble" with branches and stems and whatnot. With appropriate clipping and using a wavelet texture map importer like WavGen, you could easily map the entire thing without huge RAM requirements.

I would suggest adding a normal map to the water surface to attenuate the reflections a bit - the pool's surface looks a bit too glassy. Other than that it looks pretty impressive.

Unfortunately, no. Bjorne Marle was very responsive and attempted to answer some questions, but we really need somebody from marketing and from product development to join the conversation. I've pinged the individuals Bjorne told me to contact and have not received a response yet. For those who really do want to see C4D at ResPower, please contact Maxon and ask them to be proactive in working to get C4D support on the ResPower Super/Farm. Companies tend to lend more weight to a chorus of their customers than to a single individual asking to team up. Their contact info is available here: http://www.maxon.net/pages/contact/about_maxon_e.html

Update! We have recently discovered some features in 3dStudio that should allow us to support *ridiculously* large images. I.e., no need to worry about the 2GB limit, at least as far as the output image is concerned. Preliminary testing is positive, but more work is needed prior to officially supporting it. Please contact us if you are interested in trying it out before it hits the street. http://www.respower.com/page_contact Will keep you posted, of course!

Unfortunately, the bucket rendering requires use of VRay's internal scheduler, which is incompatible with the ResPower scheduler, so our only large-format rendering support will be split-frame rendering for the time being. We are trying to schedule some of our time to work with Vlado to address this. Also unfortunately, Max allocates RAM for the entire frame buffer, even in the case of split frame rendering, so RAM shortages due to the 2GB limit are unaffected for Max. AFAIK, the only render engine we support that does not have this particular issue is Lightwave, because it renders images in smaller segments to conserve memory. [Of course, this leads to artifacts with certain plugins ]

Not a dumb question at all . We offer a service called "Split Frame Rendering," wherein the farm divides your image into a grid (you specify how tight the grid should be, e.g., 5x5 or 10x10). It is supported on all of our render engines with the exception of Vue. In the case of 3dStudio, we simply use the "region render" option to mask away everything that is not in the current bucker. There are some drawbacks that you need to consider: 1) It is *extremely* difficult to predict how long this will take or what sort of speedup you can expect. Even harder than with animations!! What we typically do is offer a free split-frame render at low resolution prior to submitting the high-resolution version. I.e., if you submit a 640x480 render with a 5x5 split, and it takes 5 GHz*Hrs to complete, then we can guess that a 6400x4800 render with a 5x5 split will take 500 GHz*Hrs, because the hi-res version will have 100 times the number of pixels. Even then, though, the cost is difficult to predict, because pixel count is not the only variable involved. See the discussion of GI below... 2) Our experience shows that it does not offer a significant speedup for most scenes that require GI. This is because with GI, the radiosity solution / photon map / etc., must be calculated regardless of which pixels are being rendered. In raytracing or scanline rendering, this isn't the case, so more benefit is derived from splitting up into smaller buckets. Steps can be taken to curtail the duplicated effort involved, although I do not yet have enough experience with Vray to know if they are viable solutions. Some examples of possible solutions are building radiosity solutions, caching shadow maps, etc., prior to rendering. 3) Our system does not yet reassemble the file. In other words, the output files we deliver is a series of images that need to be stitched together in Photoshop (or similar). The benefit of course is: 1) If you do not use GI (E-light is great for faking GI in 3dStudio), can cache the GI solution prior to submitting on our farm, or the render engine you are using uses monte carlo path tracing to get GI instead of radiosity, you can see near-linear speedups. I.e., a 5x5 split could give you a 25x speedup, and a 10x10 split could give you a 100x speedup. Reality will probably fall a little short of that, but it will be astonishingly fast. 2) The reassembly can of course be automated. We have several customers that have written Photoshop scripts and do 5x5 splits on a regular basis since their scripts are designed to reassemble at a particular resolution with that split. They'll even submit 3 or 4 5x5 shots to run simultaneously, thereby using 100 computers in the background while they prep the next render. I've heard rumours of success using ImageMagick, but have found its scripting interface a little unwieldy for my taste.

Have you checked Turbo Squid? http://www.turbosquid.com Also, Vue Professional and Vue D'Esprit both come with plant generators (heck, that's pretty much what they specialize in...)

Again, straight from the horse's mouth Unfortunately, Maxon's net render feature is insufficient for us for a variety of technical reasons that I won't go into for strategic reasons, so some effort is required on Maxon's part in addition to ResPower's to see C4D appear at our facility. I actually contacted Maxon on several occasions to get their assistance in integrating C4D with ResPower, but things always seem to fall through the cracks. I'm still waiting on a demo CD I asked for 6 months ago So, if you want to see C4D at ResPower, please make a concerted, organised effort to contact Maxon and push them to do whatever is necessary to add their render engine to our system. Some usefull comments to make: 1) As a paying customer, I can tell you that a service like ResPower's would be truly beneficial for your installed base. 2) I've used ResPower for my (Lightwave/3dStudio/Maya/Vue/mental ray) projects, and it was totally awesome - why don't you make sure they have C4D, because you're being left behind! 3) I can't stay in business and purchase upgrades if I do not have options when it comes time to crunch through big renders. I'll have to switch to something that ResPower supports the next time I upgrade, like 3dStudio or Lightwave. I could probably brainstorm for a few hours on ideas for getting them to work with us, but I have rendering to do and computers to add. Cheers! Early Ehlinger, CEO, ResPower - Soon-to-be-2.7 THz Render Farm. (That's right, Terahertz )

Hi Dave! There was a bug in the splutterfish license server when dealing with lots of render nodes (like what we have); it caused the the license server to keep crashing. I'm pretty sure we've resolved this now with Splutterfish's help. As for nodes crashing - that still does happen on occasion (it always will - we are running Windows after all...), but it's much less of a nuisance now that we have 400 (soon to be 600) nodes. I.e., if a computer crashes, we've still got 599 others working on the job. -- Early Ehlinger, CEO, http://www.respower.com

I saw a few messages in this thread that I feel compelled to respond to so that they come straight from the horse's mouth Our system is designed to allow us to support multiple configurations of Max simultaneously. You may select the version of v-ray,brazil,insight, final render, or even standard scan-line that you want to render when you submit your job. We can add additional configurations easily enough, including new plug-in render engines when they become available. We actually do not monitor your jobs at all. There's no way we would be able to and stay in business at the same time, because we would never get a chance to sleep. Some 3d artists like to work through the night, and others like to work through the day - add to that the fact that our customer base spans the globe and our render jobs are submitted at totally random times. That's why we made our system self-service. As long as you don't need technical support, our schedule doesn't have to synch up with yours. Of course, if you do need tech support, then get my lazy butt out of bed and onto your project Prices are entirely based upon how long your render takes. If your render takes substantially longer, it will cost substantially more. Jeff's happened to be a fairly quick job that required just a few minutes per frame. A few quick words of caution on the cost guesstimator on our site: 1) It ain't scientific. It takes the time you give us, multiplies it by the number of frames and the speed of your computer. That gives you GHz*Hrs. It then multiplies by some factors to account for network, memory, etc.. It finally multiplies by cost/GHz*Hr to give you the final guess. 2) The numbers it expects as input are for your computer's time. We have had one or two people put in "the number of computers they think they'll need", as the number of processors, and get really whacky results. I.e., it's a 1 hour-per-frame render on their 1 GHz box, but the user wanted to use all 400 of our machines and put 400 into the processors box, so the guesstimator said that each frame would be 400 GHz*Hrs instead of 1 GHz*HR! 3) You can use it as a tool to decide how much time to budget for rendering. I.e., you can say "gee, if my renders take 1 hr, then I can't possibly afford to use a render farm at the end of this project. But if I can get the renders to 3 or 4 minutes, then it's viable." I'd like to personally thank Jeff for his kind words - it's always nice to see testimonials out there. Usually when I see them, there aren't any responses that leave me compelled to jump into the conversation. The community here at CG Architect is absolutely amazing, with active responses and insightful questions. -- Early Ehlinger, CEO, http://www.respower.com