[Irinikus]

Some more messing around in Blender as the lighting and texture setup is a bit different to that of Maya! (It's far easier to get a good looking output from Maya, especially of you, like me don't know what the hell you're doing in Blender!!!) It's pure trial and error at this point!



Now back to the Tezro, to finish this module off once and for all!

[Irinikus]

I've made a start on the traces and are replicating them as accurately as possible, without removing chips from the board, as there are via's precent beneath some of the chips! But from a visual perspective it will be a very accurate representation of the actual board.

This is far more time consuming that I would have thought, as it's all being constructed from polygons!!!!



Here are the resources being used for the render: (Remember that this is just one of eight boards that will constitute the module.)



Here's where I am currently: This is a rather good mental exercise!

[weblacky]

I love (what look to be) the soldering fillets on the SMD components.

[Irinikus]

Thanks Man! (I am trying to make it look as realistic as possible! )

Here's my latest progress: (I'm taking this slowly as it is rather time consuming)

It's a straight down view looking directly down the Y-Axis to give you a proper view of the detail of the traces that I'm currently working on. (Just remember that this is completely constructed from polygons!)

[Irinikus]

I was really hoping to finish the traces on the board today, but this is as much as I could stomach for the day, so I guess it will take at least another sitting!



The Tezro is starting to battle with this single board, so I do hope I'll be able to finish it, before passing it on to Blender on the Mac!!!

Here's the rendering info for this scene! It doesn't appear to be very taxing, but I now have to render it from the Maya console, otherwise Maya crashes the system!!!!

[indigofan]

Use those other machines and set up distributed rendering.. Trying to get a NT box set up to be a render slave, it renders 2-3X faster than my Fuel. It's looking like it's coming along nicely.

[Irinikus]

The problem here isn’t just rendering.

If I have to duplicate this board at this point, Maya crashes!

It’s one of eight boards constituting a complete module, so at this point, the only way in which I can build up a complete module is to import this board together with the various other parts into Blender on my Mac and then duplicate this board another seven times to complete the module.

[Irinikus]

This basically completes the Cray 2 Memory module!!!



I couldn't even export one complete board as a .obj file without Blender crashing, so I had to export a single board in two parts, being the circuit board with traces and the the components separately.

The Power couplings and spacers were also imported separately, once I'd duplicated the complete circuit board with components another seven times!

[indigofan]

Maybe some optimization on the model before replicating it? You should be able to see the object count. You should be able to try Polygons - Reduce or Polygons - CleanUp. There are also a bunch of other options for rendering optimization, it just takes some time to tweak it all to find the happy balance.

[Irinikus]

There is absolutely no way in-which you'll be able to render this model on an SGI and still maintain the same level of detail!

Just remember that although the likes of Toy Story was largely modelled using SGI's, the final render was in-fact carried out using a render farm consisting of SPARC CPU's!

"A cluster of 117 (87 dual-processor and 30 quad-processor, 100-MHz) SPARCstation 20s with 192 to 384 megabytes of RAM, and a few gigabytes (4 or 5gb) of disk space each. They ran Solaris, with Pixar’s proprietary “Renderman” software, and a SparcServer 1000e for job distribution.

Pixar had some storage arrays totalling ~250GB (an SGI Challenge with 144 gigabytes, and a Sun array of 108 gigabytes) that the movie was ultimately rendered to before being backed up to magnetic tape (no more than 40GB per tape, likely less according to wikipedia’s specs on the Exabyte 8mm data tape aka data8 format) and then rendered to film for delivery, as the disk array was not actually large enough to store the final render in its entirety."

So I really don't mind using a more powerful machine to carry out the final render of my models. (As long as all of the individual parts are created using the Tezro!)