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.

Biz2Be 3D Logo Animation

I made another 3D Logo Animation. This this for Biz2Be. It was animated in Cinema 4D and it was rendered in High Quality on RenderFarm.NL. The customer uses the logo as intro and outro of his videos that you can find on http://www.biz2be.nl.

NewTek LightWave 1.6 now on RenderFarm.NL

From today RenderFarm.NL also supports NewTek's LightWave version 1.6. So If you use this 3D application and you need affordable render capacity for your 3D animations you can contact me on michel@renderfarm.nl. I also did some minor updates on the RenderFarm.nl website that you can find on http://www.renderfarm.nl

3D Main Board Project (Part 1)

I'm currently working on a lot of projects at the same time. Some of them take up a lot of time though so it can take a while before I can show you something. This is a project I did a while ago to learn a bit more about the new physical render engine in Cinema 4D and especially the Depth of Field function. I used a free model of a Main Board and added a CPU and some DIMM memory modules and then tried to find some nice angles to render. As you can see the image is not sharp everywhere. The focus of the (virtual) camera determines this. In this way the renders look more like actual photographs.

Here is another angle of the same main board a bit more zoomed out. Here you can also see the DIMM memory modules. Everything is based on an actual photograph by they way with the components modeled on top of that picture. The Depth of Field in this image is a lot more subtle but it is still there. Don't forget to click on the pictures for a larger version by the way so you can look at the in more detail.

And here is the last one again from a different angle. I think they worked out quite nice. I'm planning to do an animation of this scene as well in the future, but my render farm is already running full time for a long time on some other animations. I'm really short on CPU now-a-days. For your idea: a render of a sill image like this in high quality already takes up a couple of hours. If you make an animation of lets say 10 second, you need 250 pictures since there are 25 frames in a second. So well do the math :) I hope to show you the new animations soon. I just wanted to share these images with you. I'm sure more will follow from this project in the future.