However, the Connect to Server option available from the Gnome desktop isn’t reachable via command line, it seems, or really mounted anywhere, so I could access the other machine across the network with it. I had to go to the command line, where a “mount -t smbfs …” command did the trick. One for two. Oh well.

Anyway, I’ve found that I’m not only impressed with Blender’s rendering speed under Linux, but it also seems to make significantly better use of my graphics card (nVidia Quadro FX 550) than Windows ever did. Scenes that were frame skipping while panning in 3D on Windows are just cruising along. I tweak some of the first shot’s animation in Linux, and the response time when working was so much better, I’ll be booting into Ubuntu for animation work from now on.

I’ve also started working on the tweaking and re-render for the August release of The Beast. The production version of the animation is finalized and on the book’s DVD. However, over the next month and a half I’ll be spending a little more time on the animation itself to give it another round of refinement. Also, I’m rendering in HD at 16:9 (the production version is NTSC 4:3) and have updated the lighting and compositing pipeline for a better outcome. The overall sound will be getting a remix by the music’s composer.

In my quest to reduce render times, especially now that I’m going HD (1080p), I decided to try out the always-stated fact that Blender renders faster under Linux than Windows. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 (64-bit, using wubi) on my laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM), and after using Envy to install the proper nVidia drivers, found that it was true. An HD frame (1920×1080) from the opening shot renders in 1:50 in Linux, but takes 2:55 in Windows XP. Same computer, dual booting. Yikes. That’s crazy. I’ll be installing this on my main workstation, too. That’s going to drastically cut render times.

* I say Book completion, because I will continue to refine The Beast during the summer, even though I have to include a version with the book within the next few weeks. All of the instructional aspects of the animation will still be 100% valid with the version included with the book, but the final animation I’ll be releasing at the end of the summer enjoy a higher level of polish.

On the topic of The Beast,  I think it’s going to be a great learning tool. It’s not unbelievably complex like Elephants Dream was or (I’m guessing) Big Buck Bunny is, and I’m hoping the files and techniques will be accessible and useful to everyone who reads the book. In fact, a lot of the stuff I did in the animation were purposefully done in order to provide a teaching example for the book.

I’m getting frames back from the render farm as I work to clean and finish the animation for the 2/3 of shots that haven’t yet been rendered. There are some neat effects and some fairly simple but effective compositing setups for putting together scenes. It’s a lot of fun!

“Feel the Love” — frequent statement of the Right Reverend Love Master Mr. James Markham

“Practically Perfect People Never Let Sentiment Muddle Their Thinking” — Mary Poppins

“Come on Party Puppies - Put Your Paws in the Air” — dog-lover’s bastardization of The Roof is on Fire

“Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms Should Be A Convenience Store not a Government Agency” — this one’s just the truth, man

“Be Audacious Brave and Courageous - Against These Weapons Society Has No Defense” — the ABC plan from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man — Read this book. You won’t believe it was written fifty years ago, as opposed to, say, last month.

“It’s Better To Do Something Bad Now Than To Have To Do Something Horrible Later” — Walter Slovotsky (paraphrase)

“See the Torus” — a vaguely anal insult (or statement of spiritual quest) for 3D folks and math geeks

“Oh Good, My Dog Found the Chainsaw” — Lilo (the little girl, not the bootloader or queue type)

“That Is The Sound of Inevitability. It Is The Sound Of Your Death.” — Hugo Weaving, Devouring Scenery

“w00t to the Ceiling Cat!” — LOLCats translation of “Glory to God!”

1. I was able to get it working with minimal grief. It comes with Perl sources, plus compiled binaries for Windows, OSX and Linux, as well as a Python script for Blender for job submission.
2. It allows you to run a heterogeneous farm: 1 Mac (Dual G5), 2 Linux (Dual Xeon), and 3 Windows (2 are Dual PIII, and one is a Quad Xeon, which, incidentally, chews up the renders like crazy)
3. The ability to quickly use custom builds. No binaries are stored on any of the slave computers — you just plop your binaries on the master and set your paths correctly. This means that if you want to use updated builds, you just drop them in the ./bin folder on the master machine and all the slaves run with the updated binaries.

Adding slaves is as simple as mounting an SMB (Windows) share from the master host and typing a command. It also has a simple web interface that lets you track your jobs. Not as fancy as what the Peachers are using, but I don’t have Sun Microsystems as a donor on my project.

I’ve also finally identified the correct lighting setup for the renders. Of course, as the preliminary renders are being returned, I’m tweaking things (animation, materials, lighting, etc.) for the final high-quality renders. I’ve been looking for just the right interior lighting setup that will allow me minimize overall render times while keeping the quality of the interiors high and retaining controllability over the key lighting on the characters. It took me several iterations and some dead ends, but I’ve finally figured it out.

So, good news all around. By the way, I just passed the half-way point on the book this week.

So, instead of using the cloth sim, I’m just including the skirt inside the mesh deform cage for the rest of the body, which gives good enough deformations in testing.

I’d still like to use the cloth sim somewhere in the animation just for fun, but there’s no where that it really fits.

The book (Animating with Blender: Creating a Short Animation from Start to Finish) is about half written. Also, I have time on a small render farm donated to The Beast, which exposed a bug in Blender’s strand distribution method. Child particles were generated differently on different processors, meaning that non-homogenous render farms couldn’t be used for animation with particles. Brecht just fixed it this morning (Thanks!) so rendering on the finished animation files can commence!