Loklo Media 3D Animation Blog

I rendered the hummer benchmark scene (http://www.evermotion.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=46777) on both my overclocked q9550 and overclocked 1090T, and the results are in: approximately the same per core speed, but since it’s 6 cores vs. 4, the AMD is faster.
Q9550 @ 3.4GHz with 6GB DDR2 ram: 7:44 (with render bucket size changed to 32, and order changed to hilbert)
1090T @ 3.6GHz with 8GB DDR3 ram: 4:34 (32/hilbert).
I will be doing more comparisons, and overclocking the 1090T to 4.0GHz (It wasn’t stable with my initial efforts)… so stay tuned.
The cheap MSI n430 GT video card has a faulty fan, which is going for RMA… and the Mobo won’t boot without video, so It’s turned off for now.

Here’s an awesome resource for HDR (or EXR) high dynamic range images to use as light probes in your favorite 3D animation/rendering program (I use 3DS Max and either Mental or v-Ray now; Blender somewhat supports these as well).

He’s got dozens of different skies – so if you don’t like this one, you can surely check out the rest in his collection! (oh… they’re not free – but a good deal!)

These images are used for the ambient environment light in your scene, to give a more natural and realistic feel to your renders compared to a generic sky that comes with Mental ray or vray. Obviously if you’re trying to match your scene for a photo-comp, you’d need a sky probe as close to the real photo as possible – he’s probably got what you need.

After several headaches and struggles with Mental Ray for animation, Loklo Media is now equipped with V-Ray (Thanks to cgarchitect.com). V-Ray is definitely quicker and simpler to setup, with better results. Overtime, it will pay for itself, just too bad that we have tp pay for Mental Ray, but essentially leave it behind in the dust. Oh Well!

Onward and upward. I’ll be posting a few depth of field and green screen tutorials and posts in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Please consider donating for more tutorials if you found this one useful!

Thanks to a post on The Area forums, I found out about these procedural textures.  They are open source, free, and great.  Supported renderers include scanline, VRay, and Brazil (Mental Ray is not supported at the moment – if someone ports them, let the author know!).

http://www.ylilammi.com/BerconMaps.shtml

I don’t use procedurals very often, and my current main render engine is in fact Mental Ray… so I don’t have much else to say about these.  But they look awesome, and I thought I’d share!!