Pixel Plow

So I did an analysis of how much it costs me to render. I was surprised about how expensive it is. And now I am rethinking my experiment with Pixel Plow.
Pixel Plow is the cheapest rendering service for Blender 3D. Cheapest by far. And it is super-duper fast. Even at the slowest speed it is way faster than my fastest GPU accelerated machine.

Unless I put my i7 with Quadro4000 GPU in a place where electricity is "free"*, it's actually fairly inefficient for me.

Now in order to do that I'd certainly have to get Logmein Pro which is $250/year.

And all that brings me back to Pixel Plow.

They make it relatively easy to render with them. The frames come down to you automatically as they're created. And now that we're in 4K it makes a much bigger difference to get those frames done so that a fellow can get to actually finishing the dang movie (whichever movie that might be.)

So today I am pro Pixel Plow for big renders.

*The morality of such use is up for grabs but those places where one has/does pay a single rate for electric no matter what the use does/do exist.

Shadow Plane

Oh my. Making a "shadow only" plane so that your 3D object casts a shadow on the ground is a pain in the tuchus with Cycles in Blender.
But. It can be done.
Dig this fellow's tutorial. David Fesliyan explains how to do it. It's a bit, er, convoluted. But it makes a clean shadow pass. (Do yourself a favor and make sure "compositing" is left checked in the render panel or you will be as confused as I was for a substantial amount of time earlier today.)

Ignore the unplugged lens distortion.

You have to put the shadow plane on one layer and then do things with nodes. Subtract, "set alpha" and then "alpha over". Make sure that layer receives shadows. Then move your sun(s) around so the shadows match your original image. And make sure that the outputs are in the correct order in "alpha over".
There seem to be other ways to do shadow planes in Cycles but this method does not involve putting a garbage matte in over the ground plane. And it seems to work.
I say seems. I know not am.
I think at full resolution this render takes about two hours on my fastest machine. But it should make a right pretty composite so I'll let it go for the weekend and see what I've got.

Overwrite

So. I've been working in Blender for a number of years now. And I just discovered something pretty basic.

See, we render frame sequences. This means that each frame is a new file -- typically a .png image. This is better than rendering out a movie in .mov or .avi format because if/when your computer crashes or otherwise stops the render it doesn't automatically destroy the whole render -- you can pick up the render at the last frame the computer was working on.
All this time, though, I was looking in Explorer or Finder for the last frame rendered, and then I would set the first frame to start rendering on that frame, and start up the render again. But it turns out, I don't have to do that!
If you don't check the "overwrite" box in the render panel the render will automatically skip the already rendered frames. The way I thought it worked was that it would render all those frames but put like a "_1" at the end. But no, instead it just does what you want it to do.

Does it make up for the fact that you can't render out shadows without making the thing the shadows are on visible in Cycles? No. No it does not. But it's something.

Under things I must do this weekend:

Render Robot Swarm B
Render Robot Swarm C

Shadows and you

Ugh. So it turns out you can't just do a shadow-pass on an otherwise invisible plane in Blender anymore using Cycles. This is apparently because Cycles only understands "light", not shadows.
If you enbiggen the image above you'll see that our little robot does cast a shadow. But that square thing is sits on does not belong there. So I'm gonna have to render out all this nonsense and then so a crazytime job of creating an alpha channel and blah-blah-blah. This is really annoying because that's a major bit of functionality which is gone from Blender.
The environmental lighting seems much better in Cycles. But I really wish there were an easier workaround with this dang shadow issue.

Strange Works

Strangewerks Films movie Lifeform has quite a bit of crossover to Pandora Machine movies. Indeed the star of Lifeform, Virginia Logan, is the star of our new movie Dead Residents.
Brian Schiavo talks about animating the creature. Our own Nathan Taylor worked on the rigging of the monster.

Maduka Steady as the evil robot Argus in 1202 (stills for key art).

Today in the machine

For our upcoming The Promethius Trap we have the awesome Dolf Veenvliet designing and building the spaceships.
Anthony Jones is making our helmets.

A basic tutorial on the Blender interface. This was put together by Michael Richards, via the New York City Blender meetup group.
These dudes have a replica of the International Space Station. They also have a bunch of space suits and space helmets for rent and for sale. Plus they'll make custom ones for you.
Did I already mention these things? I may have already mentioned them.
+++++
The dudes at Letus have a new camera "platform" called the Master Cinema Series. I've always dug the stuff they make at Letus. The electronic viewfinder is very very sexy.
++++
An interview with Ron Cobb on the design of the spaceships in Alien.

Headless Arizona

Project London releasing their beautiful models into Creative Commons is a huge thing for indy sci-fi filmmakers.
It's big. You can make movies with their CG models -- change the colors, even make structural changes.
We needed a secondary robot for Android Insurrection and Ian suggested using his Arizona model.
The robot we need is about human-sized. And the Arizona is over 20 feet tall. So I took off its head to make it scalable as a smaller robot.

More free stuff:
Gimei has free fire and explosion footage.
The first wave of Project London Blender 3D models.
The second wave of Project London Blender 3D CC models.