Android-D2 Wallpaper and Icons
Posted: October 27, 2013
Post subject: Android-D2 Wallpaper and Icons
Post subject: Android-D2 Wallpaper and Icons
Well as you can see, it is really a very simple idea, I saw that the Android robot and R2-D2 had some similarities and I made a hybrid of them and lo and behold here is Android-D2.
I know is a wee bit more abstract work than some other Sci-fi 3D models that I have done but it still has some Star Wars into the mix and I though that maybe some of you guys would like it so I am letting you know it is there so you can download it if you want to.
It is really simple, again as usual I did it in a relatively short period of time cause I do these things in my spare time and I had to simplify and it still took a couple of days to do plus the render time which was about 38 hours in a Intel i7 2.66 Ghz 920 with 1,333 Ghz DDR-3 ram.
It is somewhat longer than Android and shorter than R2-D2 (sort of in-between) and I gave the R2-D2 like parts rounder edges and simpler lines to make them look more Android bot like and that was the result. If you want it you can get the 3D Blender model that I used for the robot by downloading the icons & 3D model .zip file set that I also did which is a separate submission in my Deviantart gallery.
Wallpaper preview:
Icons set preview:
Deviantart file download for portable devices:
http://fav.me/d6ry5z1
Deviantart file download for desktops & laptops:
http://fav.me/d6ry7h3
Deviantart icons set download:
http://fav.me/d6ry9c8
Mediafire backup download folder:
http://www.mediafire.com/folder/cuc82t8l3b093/Public_Files
I know is a wee bit more abstract work than some other Sci-fi 3D models that I have done but it still has some Star Wars into the mix and I though that maybe some of you guys would like it so I am letting you know it is there so you can download it if you want to.
It is really simple, again as usual I did it in a relatively short period of time cause I do these things in my spare time and I had to simplify and it still took a couple of days to do plus the render time which was about 38 hours in a Intel i7 2.66 Ghz 920 with 1,333 Ghz DDR-3 ram.
It is somewhat longer than Android and shorter than R2-D2 (sort of in-between) and I gave the R2-D2 like parts rounder edges and simpler lines to make them look more Android bot like and that was the result. If you want it you can get the 3D Blender model that I used for the robot by downloading the icons & 3D model .zip file set that I also did which is a separate submission in my Deviantart gallery.
Wallpaper preview:
Icons set preview:
Deviantart file download for portable devices:
http://fav.me/d6ry5z1
Deviantart file download for desktops & laptops:
http://fav.me/d6ry7h3
Deviantart icons set download:
http://fav.me/d6ry9c8
Mediafire backup download folder:
http://www.mediafire.com/folder/cuc82t8l3b093/Public_Files
Posted: October 28, 2013
Post subject:
Post subject:
38 hours of render time on a i7 processor?
Is it for a single final frame or its total rendering time including all the test renderings?
Is it for a single final frame or its total rendering time including all the test renderings?
Posted: October 28, 2013
Post subject:
Post subject:
It is for a single frame. My i7 is the very first gen and the most affordable of them (920 at 2.66 Ghz) but believe me even that i7 is very, very fast. It is very, very hard to bog the machine down in most uses.
What happens is that I rendered a pretty large image with a single camera due to time constrains. What I did was (as I do these days) to try to find a camera angle & position that is good for multiple croppings later on. I rendered a 2560 x 2048 frame that I later on cropped and resampled to the different wallpaper sizes and aspect ratios in Photoshop.
The 2560 horizontal is for cropping Apple display size 2560 x 1600 (16 to 10 ratio) & and the 2048 vertical is to accommodate much more square aspect ratios like 1600 x 1200 (4 to 3 ratio) and also to accommodate the special 2048 x 2048 (1 to 1 for rotation) aspect ratio of IPads 3 & newer (reduced also to 1024 x 1024 for IPads 2).
I used Blender's old renderer because at the moment I still know that one way better than Cycles and is something that I can control well. It uses AO with a very large number of samples (46) to make the image very soft which I like and I use a spot lamp with 4 samples on top of that.
Also it has several soft reflections materials with a very high number of samples (140 for each one) to create very soft satin-anodized metal surfaces and those add to the render time a whole lot. Believe me even with those high settings & even if it was very smooth overall it still wasn't completely smooth in a few (very, very few) soft reflection areas but this is something that I can fix rather easily & well with post-processing in Photoshop.
The depth of field effect was created also as a post-process carefully in Photoshop with the help of a depth map that I created in Blender of the whole scene. Believe me that if I had created the depth of field effect inside Blender it would have taken far more time to render yet so that is why I post-processed it.
Another thing is that the ground is not a bump map. I wasn't too happy with the way the bump map was rendering even though the newer Blender's bump maps are way better than those of the older one so the ground tiles are all geometry not a texture, all those tiles are really there. I created a special pattern with them and gave an array modifier twice (once for the vertical replication and another for the horizontal) and then after that I applied them and removed those tiles that were in the place where a hole should be. So the entire ground texture is really all geometry and that has like 850,000 vertexes alone but I loved how it looked in the test renders for such a simple pattern so I decided to go with that.
In addition I seldom if ever use the 8 threads of the CPU, I use only 7 threads (this adds some time to the mix but only somewhat so) to leave the computer free to do other tasks cause it is a long time to render and if I use all 8 threads the PC slows down too much but with that single thread free this is CPU is really very fast anyway.
And I can even play music or browse the net with no problems or even play a full HD movie with VLC in the secondary larger TV monitor that is also connected to the graphic cards while it keeps rendering without skipping a single video frame with that single free thread. That is really not that bad, it is just like what I said that I use a pretty large number of samples in the AO settings so I don't have to post-process too many corrections later on and that works for me. Once it is set the way I'm happy with it in the test renders I crank the resolution and other settings to full quality and it's fire & forget while I enjoy entertainment & other uses with the machine.
What happens is that I rendered a pretty large image with a single camera due to time constrains. What I did was (as I do these days) to try to find a camera angle & position that is good for multiple croppings later on. I rendered a 2560 x 2048 frame that I later on cropped and resampled to the different wallpaper sizes and aspect ratios in Photoshop.
The 2560 horizontal is for cropping Apple display size 2560 x 1600 (16 to 10 ratio) & and the 2048 vertical is to accommodate much more square aspect ratios like 1600 x 1200 (4 to 3 ratio) and also to accommodate the special 2048 x 2048 (1 to 1 for rotation) aspect ratio of IPads 3 & newer (reduced also to 1024 x 1024 for IPads 2).
I used Blender's old renderer because at the moment I still know that one way better than Cycles and is something that I can control well. It uses AO with a very large number of samples (46) to make the image very soft which I like and I use a spot lamp with 4 samples on top of that.
Also it has several soft reflections materials with a very high number of samples (140 for each one) to create very soft satin-anodized metal surfaces and those add to the render time a whole lot. Believe me even with those high settings & even if it was very smooth overall it still wasn't completely smooth in a few (very, very few) soft reflection areas but this is something that I can fix rather easily & well with post-processing in Photoshop.
The depth of field effect was created also as a post-process carefully in Photoshop with the help of a depth map that I created in Blender of the whole scene. Believe me that if I had created the depth of field effect inside Blender it would have taken far more time to render yet so that is why I post-processed it.
Another thing is that the ground is not a bump map. I wasn't too happy with the way the bump map was rendering even though the newer Blender's bump maps are way better than those of the older one so the ground tiles are all geometry not a texture, all those tiles are really there. I created a special pattern with them and gave an array modifier twice (once for the vertical replication and another for the horizontal) and then after that I applied them and removed those tiles that were in the place where a hole should be. So the entire ground texture is really all geometry and that has like 850,000 vertexes alone but I loved how it looked in the test renders for such a simple pattern so I decided to go with that.
In addition I seldom if ever use the 8 threads of the CPU, I use only 7 threads (this adds some time to the mix but only somewhat so) to leave the computer free to do other tasks cause it is a long time to render and if I use all 8 threads the PC slows down too much but with that single thread free this is CPU is really very fast anyway.
And I can even play music or browse the net with no problems or even play a full HD movie with VLC in the secondary larger TV monitor that is also connected to the graphic cards while it keeps rendering without skipping a single video frame with that single free thread. That is really not that bad, it is just like what I said that I use a pretty large number of samples in the AO settings so I don't have to post-process too many corrections later on and that works for me. Once it is set the way I'm happy with it in the test renders I crank the resolution and other settings to full quality and it's fire & forget while I enjoy entertainment & other uses with the machine.
Posted: October 29, 2013
Post subject:
Post subject:
Wow! I don't have a lot of experience rendering in blender, but 38 hours seems a lot for one frame.
I would expect something like this to render in less than 5 hours.
I am just currious if you would render the same scene in cycles, how much time it would take.
BTW, how do you use only 7 threads of the CPU?
I would expect something like this to render in less than 5 hours.
I am just currious if you would render the same scene in cycles, how much time it would take.
BTW, how do you use only 7 threads of the CPU?