Very Powerfull 3D Work Station

I promised to write something about the new 3D work station that I put in my new office. Even though I can use the render farm for animations it is nice to have a very powerful PC to work on the 3D projects. Primarily you need a very powerful video card to use the GPU for screen calculations. I installed a Asus Nvidea GTX 690 for this. But also CPU power is helpful since you do need to render out a single frame on high quality to see how it is going to look later on when you render the animation on the render farm. And you don't want to wait for ever. So in this machine is a special work station mother board from Asus called the Z9 PE-D8WS and on there are two Intel Xeon processors of the type 2796 V2. Actually the fastest processors out there. They actually have 12 CPU cores each so that makes 24 CPU cores in one machine!

I also installed 64 Gbytes of RAM and it boots its OS and loads its applications from a super fast OCZ Revo Drive 3. This is kind of a SSD drive on a dedicated PCIe card. The there is a OCZ Vertex 4 for the data I'm working on for the project and a Raid 1 set of two Sata disks for storage of larger files. The Asus mother board is very big, so I needed to buy a very large case to fit it all. And then to keep things a bit quiet I installed a lot of large cooling fans with a special fan control unit that you can see in the picture below. This really is a monster PC that makes working on the most complicated projects a breeze. For your idea this PC scores 2960 CB points in Cinebench where my normal Render Node Servers in the render farm score about 1000 CB.

The fan controller is also very nice. It has a touch screen where you can regulate the desired temperature for each fan. There are sensors attached to this controller on certain spots in the machine, like CPU's, GPU's, drives etc and it regulates the fan speeds to keep this temperatures. This results in a very quiet PC when it is idle and just a little bit of noise when it is at 100% CPU. I also have some software where I don't have licenses for the render farm yet, so for those applications I also use this machine to render frames for customers on RenderFarm.NL. I recently did a series of Vue renders on this machine for a customer. It is not a cheap machines as you can imagine but it does have the power of three normal PC's. I already had a lot of pleasure from it. I hope this post can help anyone else that need to spec a very nice 3D work station. But for animations do contact me for the use of the render farm so you can work on other projects on your work station during the rendering of your animation.

Our New Office Space

As some of you might know I resigned in 2012 as CEO from BIT BV, the company that I founded together with my business partner in 1996. Don't worry we didn't sell it, but I didn't like the job of being CEO any more. I like working with my hand more and that wasn't possible anymore in the company. I'm still connected closely but in the background. So in 2012 I started a new company and since then I've been very busy setting up some new services and have been working on several products.

In the beginning of the year we did a little renovation at home, mainly putting in a new floor. Since both myself and my wife work from home now we decided to build a little office at home. In the picture above you see my work space on the left and hers on the right. Here is a close-up of my workspace. It is mainly focussed on doing both maintenance of the Virtiso and the Render Farm hardware/cloud platforms and also on doing 3D design and animation stuff for Van Osenbruggen Productions. I can also work on my videos for here now. I'm currently working on new websites for Virtiso and the RenderFarm so more on that soon and also on what I do there. I know I haven't posted here in the while, but I will try do pick that up again.

Here is some of the input devices I use. On top (almost our of site) is a track pad, left a track ball in the middle a 3D mouse, then on the right my Oculus Rift and below a drawing pad. They all have their use in my work flow even though the Oculus is mainly for fun :). So this is where I spend a lot of my time lately. I also build a very special work station. I will do another post on the soon.

So I can hear some of your thinking. Did he stop making music? No I didn't! To be honest I can't wait to get back to that very soon, but I just had to start up all this new business too. That took a lot of time. Unfortunately as many of you know, you can't make a living from music any more especially the kind of music I make with Synth.nl. I will pick that up for sure soon. I plan some changes in the studio first that I will tell you about as well. OK enough on the office now. I just wanted to share with you what has been happening here lately.

Meet Tracy Ray at RenderFarm.NL

As you all know by now probably one of the new companies I'm setting up is a commercial Render Farm. This new company is called RenderFarm.NL and it has a new face. She is called Tracy Ray. Tracy is in charge of all our render cows that are at your immediate disposal. I'm still working hard on the new website but the render farm is already operational, so do contact me (or Tracy) if you have a deadline and need some frames rendered. We support a lot of software already and are always open for new things. Even custom setups are possible. If you know people that are in the media / content creation or 3D animation business then please point them to us. Our contact details are on the website at http://www.renderfarm.nl

Let us know when you have a render job. You can e-mail me at tracy@renderfarm.nl for a quote.

Makerbot Tractor 360 degrees animation

And here is a 360 degrees view of the 3D model of the Makerbot tractor as I promised. I hope it will help someone to do a better 3D print from this :)

Datacenter Pyramid Animation

A little animation I made for a customer to show the management what happens with their ICT infrastructure if they don't put fire surpression in the power distribution are of their data center. The animation was made in Cinema 4D, the fire was done with Turbulence FD, I used a soft body dynamics for the rest. The Animation was rendered on the RenderFarm.NL render farm.

Blender on the Render Farm

Even though I'm a very happy Cinema 4D user, the first thing I bumped into when I tried to find customers for the Render Farm is that not everyone is using Cinema 4D of course. There are many 3D design applications out there. One of them is even completely free since it is open source and it is called Blender. You can download it and install it and start working with it right away. I was actually amazed how powerful it is. Anyway: last week I installed Blender on the Render Farm and I did some successful testing with it. So if you use Blender (or C4D) and you have a large animation to render give me a shout and maybe we can work something out. I'm sure I can render it much faster on the render farm than you can do yourself on your own PC. More information on Blender here: http://www.blender.org/

PrimiTiveS Artwork Animation

I made a little animation of the artwork for the upcoming collaboration album together with Remy Stroomer. This animation and all the artwork was made in Cinema 4D.

Van Osenbruggen Productions Blog

Since I want to differentiate more between my different activities and the fact that I'll start even more in the future (more information will follow), I just started a new Blog for my 3D and Design activities that I do under the name 'Van Osenbruggen Productions'. So if you are interested in these activities do follow me on those other pages. I just started a new Facebook page as well and opened a new Twitter account that I will use for this in the future. You can find everything here:

• Website -> http://www.osenbruggen.nl
• Blog -> http://vanosenbruggen.blogspot.com
• Facebook -> http://www.facebook.com/Osenbruggen
• Twitter -> http://www.twitter.com/vOsenbruggen

 I had to be creative here and there with login names and URLs since some were already taken. I hope you will follow my 3D work in the future as well. Thanks! I will keep on posting the Synth.nl videos of course on here as well.

Wooden Pinball Animation

And another animation I did in Cinema 4D. This is an old Wooden Pinball machine that kids used to play with made from just some wood and nails. Everything is calculated by the physics engine of Cinema 4D and rendered with the new Physical Render engine including the motion blur.

Stair Balls Animation

I recently did this animation in Cinema 4D. A lot of balls bouncing down some stairs. Everything is calculated by the physics engine of Cinema 4D and rendered with the new Physical Render engine including the motion blur.

Adobe Edge and HTML5 Video Project

I did another project with Adobe Edge. This time I made an animation that shows my video projects on the first page of http://www.osenbruggen.nl. When you click an icon a HTML5 YouTube player pops up. You can click next to it to close the video. I hope that is clear enough by the way. I hope you like it. I plan to do the same thing on the rest of the website, but it is a lot of work so that can take some time :) I also changed the menu of the website to make more room for this animation. I guess the website will be a work in progress for a while. I tested the animation on Firefox, Explorer, Safari and Chrome and also on an Ipad and an Android tablet. It seems to work even though on an Ipad the auto start of the video doesn't work. Well please let me know if you encounter any problems. Go to the website to see it: http://www.osenbruggen.nl

3D Demo Reel 2011

This is an overview of the 3D Animation work I did in the last year. I tried to make a little compilation that shows a good average of what I can do. All animations were made in Cinema 4D. The music I put under it is the track 'Apollo 9' from my 2011 Apollo album. More information about Apollo here: http://www.synth.nl/Apollo. More information about my graphics work here: http://www.osenbruggen.nl

New Website with 3D Animation work

I know some of you like my 3D work as well as my music. I plan to do lots more work in this direction with or without my music. But because it doesn't really fit on the Synth.nl website I just put up a new website on http://www.osenbruggen.nl/. I'm planning to do some jobs for customers as well together with my wife. We already build a few websites, videos, logos and animations for customers and we are hoping to get a few more jobs in the future of course. We are using the name 'Van Osenbruggen Productions' for this from now on. Maybe you have seen the name popping up in one of my videos already by the way. Well anyway on the website you can find the videos, websites, logos and animations we did so far. More will come for sure :)