Photorealistic rendering at your finger tip

[Scrubs]

Hello,

I have been working for the past 2 months on designing a custom solution based on Blender to make photorealistic rendering directly in Mecabricks.

I built a small render farm and created the network rendering software to control it as well as the interface to plug it to Mecabricks. It means that you can even render on an iPad as everything is computed on my render nodes. This is also way faster than doing it on your home computer. Normal images are rendered in seconds while a high resolution 4K image would take about 7 minutes.This is still early stage and real life testing has just started. Stay tuned for 2018!

 

Here is a photo a the render nodes in development:

 

Edited December 13, 2017 by Scrubs

[Leewan]

This is fantastic ! I'm really looking forward to try this new feature.

On 13/12/2017 at 11:31 PM, Scrubs said:

This is also way faster than doing it on your home computer. Normal images are rendered in seconds while a high resolution 4K image would take about 7 minutes.

Or even a bit more. When I did the renders of this MOC, it took more than 5 hours per render on my poor old laptop. I should probably get a better one.  

[Scrubs]

I opened it to everybody for a few hours if you are keen to give it a shot. You just need a verified Mecabricks account https://www.mecabricks.com/en/workshop

[legolijntje]

That's a pretty cool feature!
I just tried it and it's very easy to use. I was wondering though; at first the resulting image was of a smaller resolution than the 1920x1080 it set by default. But I figured that by setting 'Percentage' to 100% it does produce a 1920x1080 image. What is that percentage? Why would a user (like me) want to change that? Isn't the resolution on its own not enough?

Also, why does a resolution of 3440x1440 not work?

Could you share some information about what hardware you have put in those 'render nodes'? Just out of curiosity 

If only you'd ever implement an LDraw importer.... :P

[Scrubs]

Percentage field is used to make some testing from a base resolution. You generally want to try a quick version at low res to make sure it is al good before. Instead of calculating the new resolution you just change the percentage. Same if you want to go to 4k, you simply change to 200%.

Resolution is limited for now as this is for testing only. Don't want to block the farm for 10minutes for 1 person. I am also the one currently paying the power for everybody. High resolutions will be available later as well as a lot more advanced settings but obviously not for free. I don't intend to pay myself hundreds of dollars every month. I am nice but not that much ;-)

Rig includes 72 threads from 6x AMD Ryzen 1600 CPUs and 5x GTX1050TI GPUs all working together controlled by my custom software.

Edited December 19, 2017 by Scrubs

[SylvainLS]

Just create a crypto currency where mining would be rendering 

[legolijntje]

1 hour ago, Scrubs said:

ercentage field is used to make some testing from a base resolution. You generally want to try a quick version at low res to make sure it is al good before. Instead of calculating the new resolution you just change the percentage. Same if you want to go to 4k, you simply change to 200%.

Ah, I see. In way it sounds pretty useful indeed.

1 hour ago, Scrubs said:

Resolution is limited for now as this is for testing only. Don't want to block the farm for 10minutes for 1 person. I am also the one currently paying the power for everybody. High resolutions will be available later as well as a lot more advanced settings but obviously not for free. I don't intend to pay myself hundreds of dollars every month. I am nice but not that much ;-)

I was already expecting something like that (both the resolution-limit and the not-for-free part). Was just hoping I could create a wallpaper for my monitor (3440x1440) 
If you'd ever implement an LDraw importer, I'd gladly pay for the renderer in a heartbeat.

1 hour ago, Scrubs said:

Rig includes 72 threads from 6x AMD Ryzen 1600 CPUs and 5x GTX1050TI GPUs all working together controlled by my custom software.

Cool! I recently bought a 1700x for myself. Those Ryzen cpus have a pretty cool price/performance ratio! Does a single render (from a single user) use all 72 threads, or are the threads split up so that multiple users can render at the same time? When I (very shortly) tried the feature this morning there didn't seem to be any delay like I was waiting for someone else's render to finish.

[Scrubs]

The LDraw import tool would be painful to make but a basic version (e.g. no flexible parts) like what I made for LDD may happen at some stage.

If you are the only one in the queue, all 71 threads (I keep one free on the master machine for webserver and network rendering) and all 5 graphic cards are working on it. Then if multiple people are queuing, algorithm is a bit smarter, but it remains mainly true. If you are in the queue, you will know it - Yellow dot next to project name and position in the queue.

These Ryzen are really good especially for the price. Quite impress by AMD on this one.

[Calabar]

On 19/12/2017 at 8:12 PM, Scrubs said:

High resolutions will be available later as well as a lot more advanced settings but obviously not for free.

That's reasonable.

Did you ever thought about occasionally allow access to more advanced settings (especially higher resolutions) to free users according with some conditions, for example in low-traffic days/hours only (weekend, night hours), being last in queue (after all paying users) and/or using a slow time-based points system, where a free user accumulates points using mecabrics online editor to access some premium feature (this could help to promote mecabrics editor).

Edited December 20, 2017 by Calabar

[Scrubs]

I didn't define yet all the ins ant outs and it may even evolve over time, but however it works I need to get some money somehow to pay for power and hardware.

That said there are some good ideas in your post. Thanks.

[legolijntje]

On 19-12-2017 at 11:27 PM, Scrubs said:

The LDraw import tool would be painful to make but a basic version (e.g. no flexible parts) like what I made for LDD may happen at some stage.

That's perfectly fine for me. You might be able to use @SylvainLS's ldraw.xml as a starting point. Because you can already import LDD files, you can just apply the transformations of the ldraw.xml on the the transformations you apply when importing an LDD file to get an LDraw importer working. Of course that leaves out all the parts that are in LDraw and Mecabricks but not in LDD but it's a good start.

If that makes sense...

[Dilvish]

So, I will have to convert from LDD or LDraw to something else first? What renderer is being used?

I created a Microsoft Azure account to render a POV-Ray scene one time. It was easy to use, but I don't think there were as many as 72 threads. And it is expensive!

Edited December 22, 2017 by Dilvish

[Scrubs]

You can import LDD models directly in mecabricks (however it ignores flexible parts and decorations) or even better build directly in MB.

This is Blender Cycles in the background. Test period is over now and I switched it off until proper release of the service sometimes in January.

[Dilvish]

Is it possible to edit scenes using text/Notepad? I am a dinosaur and am used to doing this from many years of POV-Ray.

Edited December 22, 2017 by Dilvish