It is not very usual seeing three new posts here on the same day, huh? =)

But I just saw it and I had to share: the third and last James Baxter podcast interview is now online.

Downloading...

I don't know if everyone had already seen it, but here is the teaser trailer for the next Ice Age movie, to be released in 2009.

I really love Scrat. =)

A long time ago I heard about a very promising animated movie being produced by Ilion Animation Studios, located in Spain: Planet 51.

Since then, I've been looking for more info than that on their website, but I couldn't find any relevant thing on this production other than it heavily uses 3DSMax.

But now started to appear some cool info, and the production seems to be going very well. There were some videos on the production, but this on the link is the only which remains active as I write: the other I knew about was removed by the user on YouTube. ;(

It seems it will be a very good movie.

I was wondering about render times in Blender and ways to speed it up.

Most of you may recall this page, which provides a blend file for rendering, write down the time spent and compare it with others who rendered the same scene on their computers. So I downloaded the file and started some testing.

My machine is far from being "high end" as the one figuring #1 on the list (Apple Mac Pro two Intel Xeon 3200MHz with 8 Cores, 12 seconds for render! wow... ). In 2005 it was a pretty good laptop, and it still works fine for me while I can't afford a new one. Mine has 1GB RAM, while the one on the review has only half of it.

So, let's suppose there is nothing else I can do with my Blender scene (everything is optimized, from vertex count to lights and textures) and a hardware upgrade is out of question. How much does some environment adjustments change my render speed?

I'm currently using Linux Fedora 8. Not that I gave up on Ubuntu, it's just that I like testing other distros... =)

I don't have Windows installed on my machine, so this is an 'open source only' test. ;)

For the tests I used some versions of Blender:

1. The 2.45 Linux official one that I got on blender.org;
2. The 2.45 from Fedora repositories;
3. An SVN (revision 14307) compiled by myself with some flags set for my machine ( '-march=pentium-m', '-mmmx', '-msse', '-msse2', '-mfpmath=sse');
4. The 2.45 Windows official binary, running over Wine
5. A Windows SVN optimized version compiled by Mike Pan on graphicall.org, also running with Wine.

You may ask why I used Windows versions running Wine. Well, sometime ago there was a thread on BlenderArtists.org about how fast Blender run over this layer on Linux. So, I found it valid to give it a shot too.

All renders (but one, as explained below) were made under the same circumstances: I had a minimal desktop running, with Blender as the only 'big' app opened (no web browsing, no music...). I took 3 renders with each build to make sure the results didn't vary much on the same conditions. Luckily (and pretty obviously), they didn't differ much - less than one second. I've picked the quickest ones.

Well... too much talking, right? =)

Let's take a look at the results:

1. 2.45 Official Linux build: 05:43.38
2. 2.45 Fedora build: 05:27.47
3. 2.46 Self compiled build: 04:22.05
4. 2.45 Official Windows build + Wine: 04:21.67
5. 2.46 Windows SVN + Wine: 03:45.03

I also tried I more time with my self compiled build, turning off the X server and going to the Shell as 'single user' mode to render from command line: 04:19.31

The results are quite impressive. From the official Linux build to the fastest 'Windows optimized over Wine' I could speed up the render in 2 minutes! Maybe that isn't so important when rendering stills, but when rendering animations... let's do the math for a minute of animation:

1 second = 25 frames.

1 minute = 60 x 25 = 1500 frames.

If I can save an average of 2 minutes on each frame, I can finish the entire rendering process 50 hours earlier! That's basically two days of waiting you can save!!!

So... tweak your lights, the face count, textures, get a powerful machine, but don't forget to make sure your working environment is also optimized. =)

* can anyone explain why a Windows binary over Wine runs faster than the optimized 'native' Linux build?

[UPDATE]

After searching for other cool flags to optimize the compile process, I was able to cut 16 seconds on the render time, going to 04:06.19.

But this is still not like the optimized Windows build over Wine. =P

[/UPDATE]

Pixar has this page with current job openings. "Animator" is among them.

Thinking about sending your reel? Then take a look at Carlos Baena's blog, where he listed 9 really important tips to those who are willing to send demo reels, for Pixar or any other company.