[Irinikus]

Can you believe it, the machine is still rendering!!!!



It may take 20 to 24 hours, just to render this single frame @ 800x600!!!! (With the two Pentium III's running at full tilt the whole time!)

The reason for this is the fact that the section, barrel and cap all have reflective and refractive indices, and I have two pens in the scene, one which is posted and one which has the cap in place over the section.

The refractive material covering refractive material is the real problem here!!! (Loads of light bouncing around, resulting in a huge number of computations!)

At least the 320's stability is being tested here, and so far it's holding up!

[Jacques]

Wow, that is insane. I remember rendering a single 640x512 scene on a Amiga 1200, it took 9 hours then ran out of ram at 96%! Gutted....

[Irinikus]

Wow, that is insane. I remember rendering a single 640x512 scene on a Amiga 1200, it took 9 hours then ran out of ram at 96%! Gutted....

I've just cancelled the render and restarted with the refraction index being removed from the underlying structures. Lets see how long it takes now. It had been rendering for 24 hours and was only 65% complete! Thats just ridiculous!!!

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It looks like it's going to take around 15 minutes now!!!

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Ok, this took 50 minutes and 28 seconds to render:



Here's the Titanium version:

[Gamefan]

What a little workhorse!

[Intuition]

Nice, renders man.

Great use of the VW.

[Intuition]

If it is Mental Ray you should be able to limit the reflection/refraction bounce/recursions to 2 or 3 to reduce huge amounts of reflection/refraction.

Might be able to set this in the basic render engine as well.

Usually the default is like 10 or 50 to avoid black spots from no more information but in many cases 2 or 3 will give enough that it will look %90 correct with something in the refraction.

[Irinikus]

Here's my latest rendering! (I've basically completed the piston filling mechanism for the pen.)

This Image @ 1280x1024 too 1 hour 53 minutes and 45 seconds to render on my 320!

[Irinikus]

I’ve redesigned the piston filling mechanism to allow for more travel on the piston, and better use the space within the barrel:



















This concludes my work on this model for the moment: (A video covering the pros and cons of the original Edson, as well as a discussion of this model will follow in due course.)

[Intuition]

Turned out very nice. The refraction is very strong, did it take a long while to render?

I like the very neutral white environment. Keeps it clean.

[Irinikus]

Turned out very nice. The refraction is very strong, did it take a long while to render?

I like the very neutral white environment. Keeps it clean.

Thanks! The final renderings each took just over an hour to render.

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This video is a collection of snapshots showing the development of my custom Waterman Edson Fountain Pen model on my SGI 320 Visual Workstation.

A proper discussion involving this model will follow in a future video.