The Bike

[Dune]

Yeah, I discussed the latter with Ty, and there seems a way somehow. Good luck, and I'd be interested if the PayPal system will work out, and I'll do the same, just hasn't been up to it yet.

[DocCharly65]

Bad news. Ulco
I got response yesterday afternoon:

Nils,

Unfortunately, we don't currently accept PayPal.  Credit cards are the only form of payment we presently accept.  Let us know if you have further questions.

Thanks,

Pixel Plow Support

Never mind... The old AcerPC is activated for rendering now too. Found an "easy" job with less populations for him 
Now all my TG prof licences are in use... Cool - I've got my own miniature render-farm 



...................................

I did some test calculations for the "bike with boots" and all its reflections.
On my "highspeed monster machine" I need app. 60 min per frame. Means app. 12 days.

The render farms from the Planetside recource-links:

• ranchcomputing.com -- 121$ (22 Minutes), Paypal and credit cards, Terragen 3.2.02.0 - compatible
• garagefarm.net -- 78$ (no info about time), Paypal and credit cards, Terragen 3.1 compatible
• pixelplow -- 24$ (no info about time), only credit cards, Terragen 3.2 compatible incl. alpha plug ins

The ranchcomputing price calculator didn't show my processor, so instead of my i7 4790 I chose a i7 960 3.2GHz. (at home I could try again with cinebench for exact calculation)

But...

Hey ... app. 30 Minutes instead of 12 Days...!!!  (if it works) perhaps it's even worth the 121$ including the hope that it's much cheaper in reality because of my different Processor.

But on the other side for a non profit hobby project... (complete movie can be up to 23000 frames --- would be 5000-8000$ only render costs... with paypal-compatible farms and 1000-1500$ with pixelplow...

Also you will have unsuccessful renders (if you find out at frame 250 of 300 that you should better put some dirt on wheels     )

I really really hate credit cards - especially in internet... but saving up to 6000 bugs! ...
I must do some really complicated decisions in the next days...

[Kadri]

Yeah just because of those kind of factors i choose to render at half HD. Even that takes long depending on the scene.
That was the time i begun to cut here and there with other ways to get faster renders out by doing some work in programs like Hitfilm and Lightwave
then doing all work in Terragen and trying to use render passes-elements so much i can do.

[Dune]

I wish you luck with your decisions, Nils. Hard, I know. But for $6000 you can have yourself quite a nice renderfarm, which can do more than just the one movie!

[DocCharly65]

OK - Visa is ordered...

You are right on one hand Ulco, but I did some calculations. Could be uneconomical for me to have a render farm.
Three PCs running 300 hours would be app. 54$ costs only for electricity (just calculated 3 x 0.3kW x 300h x 0.2$/kWh)
And I can't use 3 PCs for 2 weeks.

Maybe the calculation is very worst case - I estimated 300W per PC (in reality the power supplies of my PCs are 300W the small Asus, 500W the big Asus, and 200 W the old Acer. And I think, the power supplies don't use 100% at all even when the processor is running on 100% all the time ... e.g. graphic card isn't used on a high level)

I'm a little scared ... next weeks my annual electricity bill will arrive 
Good luck I don't use a freezer in my household 

... Hey we have reached frame 30 of 300 after 1.5 days

[attach=1]

You can see there is a just very subtile slight glimmer of worn bright areas on tires and I added a few small areas with small stones.

[Dune]

These little things like the few stones make it very realistic.

[DocCharly65]

PANIC!

Bad weekend!
My old Acer stopped working (ok we have 32 degree C (89F) here)
In all of my animation renders I found mistakes after 5 days.
Postmen are still on strike in Germany so I still didn't get my Visacard (to join pixelplow)

So I wanted to test "The RANCH" and registered there (1.7 ct at there instead of 1 ct at pixelplow seemed ok for me to test it. BUT...

I need to export the project of course.
But always when I want to export gathered project I get an error "An error occured while trying to gather the project"
That message is not really helpful.

I checked, that the path and the export file-name dont use no unsupported letters... only a-z and 0-9 - even no blanks.
If it's problematic to have the objects and filenames or the shader names in thhe same "style"

...then I have a real problem: over 7000 files and 200 folders to check for "the Bike and Boots"
To check all and change names will need more time than rendering it here on my machines.

I think I will have the same problem with pixelplow - right?
(I did new price calculations with new and exact data... My bike would cost 35$ at Pixelplow and 200$ at The RANCH)

Pfff  - I and my too big untidy render projects 


Any good suggestion?

[Oshyan]

Open your project with tgdcli.exe (in the Terragen install folder) and try to Export Gathered Project again. Look in the log window to see if there is any additional error information. Also, are any of the assets showing as problematic in the Export window? You can check the "only show assets with problems" option to focus on anything that has an issue.

- Oshyan

[Dune]

I had that a few times, but in that case it was an open space in a texture name. But that has been resolved. It can also be a missing texture or an empty file (DAZ seems to overwrite the excisting texture file with an empty one in some cases, though you're probably not using DAZ). No errors or warnings to be seen when opening the file in TG?

[DocCharly65]

I tried Oshyans suggestion, but had the same result.

In all the Poolhouse - projects I have in fact a warning of a missing .mtl but it's not really missing... and no problems with rendering.... strange!

I fear that project has grown too big, to check all the names of the few hundreds of objects and textures. I made the experience, that I must mostly reconnect every texture and in some cases completely "re-insert" the whole object. Only the repair-actions of the bike was several hours for example. In that time until i have checked and renamed everything in that project I would also have finished the renderjob...

But for future projects I know better now, what details I have to consider.

I have a perhaps strange structure of my project in your eyes: Theoretical in that procect are all objects and populations integrated so that I could render a 360° view. For my different views and animations I just deacvtivate the not needed populations and especially not needed reflective objects to spare rendertime.



Anyway for the moment I must replace the old Acer. I checked the hardware and must correct my last info: Its one of the last AMD Phenom II 4x2.8 GHz / 8GB Ram / Redeon 65xx Graphics. It was one of the best in 2006 but must get buried now    It's even louder as my vacuum cleaner 

I ordered a worthy successor I think (I have a coupon and a little discount therefore, it is an acceptable investment)
This will be the machine for just developing scenes while the two Asus do their render jobs. And of course I need it for my usual PC usage like homeoffice, internet and some graphics:

Prozessor: Intel® Core™ i7-4790 Quad-Core 4. Generation (Haswell)4C/8T / 3,6 GHz (Turbo 4,00GHz) / L3-Cache: 8MB / 84W
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H81M-D2V mATX
RAM: 8192 MB 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM
HDD 1: 120 GB SATA-3 SSD
HDD 2: 1000 GB SATA-3 (7200U/min.)
Laufwerke: DVD-Brenner
Grafik: Nvidia GeForce GTX760 Overclocked Grafik, 2 GB GDDR5 (2x DVI, Display Port, HDMI,) PCI-Express 3.0, unterstützt Nvidia GPU-Boost, Nvidia Adaptive Vertical-Sync, Nvidia 3D-Vision Ready, Nvidia Surround, Nvidia SLI®-Technology, Nvidia Physix® Technology

[Dune]

Sounds good. Another thing that could be the problem is that you changed architecture of an object. Perhaps, I don't know. I occasionally change a tgo and forget to reload the new version (same name) by hand, as TG will load the thing, but with the old shaders or parts. A problem might arise there.

[Kadri]

Instead of the better graphics card i would try to buy a 6 core cpu and-or more ram.
You could upgrade the graphics card later. Depends on what you do of course.
Hitfilm uses my graphics card heavily for example.

[DocCharly65]

Right, but it was a set anyway and sometimes while using Magix or other video prog I need a graphicscard, that is "ok" (or while playing Alien Isolation, Akan wake or ... äähhmm... you don't know this -- I never told this...      )

But I think I will add some memory later.

[DocCharly65]

Was that really more than a year ago? 

While the other PCs are rendering space and alien animations I needed another perspective for my brain to relax.
It could happen that the poolhouse scenes must wait for the "director's cut version" of my film but I wanted to start reworking the scenes for TG4 rendering.

I had to change one important thing not really visible:
Almost all pops are new and MUCH smaller (I think in the TG3 original I had between 20-50 million instances of plants in more than 20 pops for a 360° view). Now I have limited the pops to the viewed area and used less dens object spacing.

A minor change was exchanging the millions of little rocks I used as as dirt with some pops of the NWDA dirt pack.
Result is a similar (I think better) look and much increased render speed.

Additionally I added the new tree on the right behind the wall and moved tractor, horses, radio tower and farmhouse ...

The whole image is a bit out of focus so it's a little blurred. Additionally a bit bloom effect for all in all a slightly dreamy look.

[attach=1]

This time a 3D version (redblue glasses needed) again:

[attach=2]

[Dune]

Time goes fast  Nice render again, Nils. One thing that struck me, the sweaty-ass-shiny saddle. Shouldn't that be a little less reflective?