Transatlantic Rendering Relay.

You may have seen this render before. She is to be The Writers' Block virtual spokesperson. She is so far unnamed, but will be voiced by the lovely @tinypaleokitchen. @rhondak had an awesome idea to leverage today's technology in order to create short animations to introduce new members to The Block. We also have bigger plans for the future.

This was created in Daz Studio, an application that does a great job of representing the human form. The figures can be clothed and different hair styles applied, different characters applied to the base figure. Facial expressions can be tuned to make them smile or frown for example, and all of this can be animated.

Unfortunately Daz Studio is also a pain in the rear to work with. Sure, we could export the figure to something like Maya to animate and render in there, but the materials this Genesis 8 figure uses are not easily transferable. They are tuned for the in built Daz Studio renderer, Iray.

Nevertheless, @rhondak has soldiered on and created a scene and short animation for our spokesperson. For a short 20 second animation, which will run at 25 frames per second, we are looking at rendering 500 frames. Although Rhonda has a spiffing new gaming laptop with great specs, the rendering takes its toll on her machine. Each frame takes her well over an hour to render and her laptop's fans are in permanent overdrive. She has been known to place her laptop on top of ice packs, raising the laptop from her desk in order to allow more airflow in to cool it. As the task of rendering is quite intensive, she cannot use her laptop for anything else while this is happening. Rhonda is in the US.

I am sharing the rendering load here in the UK, and uploading each frame to a shared Google Drive folder which Rhonda has access to. We coordinate with each other which series of frames each will render, so there is no overlap with wasted frames.

I recently upgraded my PC with most components, apart from the graphics card. I have an Nvidia GTX 980 which - while no slouch - is quite ancient in the technological race for faster graphics processors. Even so, my system can render the same frames of animation in a little under 40 minutes. Not bad you might think but consider this: if I were to render all of the animation on my own, this 20 second clip would take me a solid 2 weeks of rendering, running 24 hours a day. It's kind of gutting when I watch videos such as this:

This too is in Daz Studio and is actually rendering in real-time. The system this is running on contains two Titan X video cards. Since the introduction of the GTX 1080 Ti, the Titan X has become unavailable - the 1080 Ti is almost the same card with 11GB of memory compared with the 12GB on the Titan - but at half the price. Even so, the cost of a 1080 Ti eclipses what I just spent on a new motherboard, processor, memory and m.2 drive.

Rhonda and I will plod on within our current systems limitations. See you in two weeks when we have finished rendering ^.^

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