pouët.net

i was just thinking as i was watching the awesome soup Treadle by HBC that "if only it were done in Blender, geeks with a small epeen (like me) would be happy to render it for them".

and this morning after i woke up with a videogame hangover, i wondered if The Scene knew about blender / burp / boinc... (unless blender was a steaming pile of something, somehow)

i'm a poor advocate for things, but my best summary for BURP is that it's a distributed computing project for Blender (for non commercial projects)... i can't remember if there were other restrictions, but here's the page: http://burp.boinc.dk/

all new renderer projects that wont aim for cuda seem pointless to me right now.

or HPC for that matter..

actually come to think of it, if it was a properly developed project, standard distributed computing rendering would be quite cool already.

but the project still seems too beta.

and actually boinc seems to be tuning their cuda support
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/cuda.php
so burp might get more interesting in the future. if it would be stable, robust and support other 3d modelling apps aswell..

i THINK the boinc support of cuda is "stable enough" ... i'm assuming ps is referring to Blender?

surely SOMEONE could whip up something quick to see how the (burp) system works for them ;) and then groups could proceed from there based on how well/poorly it worked... (units that use smaller amounts of memory would be appreciated, at least by me)

*whistles in ignorant bliss at understanding what all would need to go into a blender project*

i just used blender, my newly invented zucchini soup is excellent!

stable enough was refering to burp.
anything self-proclaimed alpha that only works for one specific 3d modelling program (in constant ongoing development) cant possibly be that stable yet.
but it does have potential. would be cool to know more about it from the people actively involved.

Is cuda supported on anything other than nvidia hardware yet? If not it seems pretty pointless to support it when proper open stuff will be available soon like opencl and the dx computer shader or whatever it's called.

How does more processing power make better renderings? Faster, sure, but better? Surely that comes from talent.

Talent has to be backed up by the right tools though.. you can have all the talent in the world, but if you're spending 90% of your time waiting for renders to finish you're not exactly working at peak productivity.

Better precision/approximations in general, additional effects (rendering 12x motion blur!) etc.

Ideally, you want everything to go as smoothly and real time-y as possible, without any compromises. That won't make a mediocre 3d-artist better, but a good one a lot more productive.

psonice: cuda is nvidia only. but i think they are converging towards opencl. in a couple years or so. if we're lucky.

some lame attempt at sounding like Borat or something

as for a universal language thingie, i'm looking forward to DX11... but then again, that alienates the Linux diehards...

i think burp will always remain a blender-user as it's free. i'm currently trying to imagine a BYO 3D App and how it would interact with BOINC... (what with multiple install locations, version numbers, etc, seeing as how most 3d applications are payware)

which reminds me, i wonder if the free, educational version of Maya allow for rendering output? (be it with a educational-tagged image or not?)