Renderfarm servers

Added two more shots:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_YKwR5ZDfyls/THtt8VCtc2I/AAAAAAAAAC8/wKxlthE89CM/s1600/side.png

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_YKwR5ZDfyls/THtz3BmaZtI/AAAAAAAAADE/02r6sqWld_I/s1600/front.jpg

Manu that's really cool stuff. We're really excited to see the finished thing over here. Personally I would like to see the colours reflect the service/website colours a bit more perhaps and to either have the official logo or use the Renderfarm.fi text with the Century Gothic Bold typeface that is used in both Blender (unofficial information, we were trying to find it out) and Renderfarm.fi. :)

I immediately started thinking of a video that would somehow play on the fact that we're actually running mostly on normal desktop and laptop machines from around the world coming together and forming this one big rendering cloud? Another idea that came to me with the first preview screenshot was had something to do with the Monolith and the planetary alignment in 2001: A Space Odyssey (with Pink Floyd in this one):

I really like the display. It could convey the difference between standalone vs. distributed rendering.

My initial thoughts are to open with a early 90's PC overheating, beeping a thermal alarm, and possibly smoking & vibrating from the stress of trying to render an animation all alone (dos/console text on the display moving from 0.0001% to 0.0002% complete). reference pic.

Cut to another PC/server (your version) smoothly contributing to a distributed job (represented by the display moving quickly/smoothly showing the farm's progress).

Do an "earth zoom" (from Finland) pulling out to show thousands of computers working together on a planetary scale.  A reverse of something like this.

Cut to the old computer. Show the screen joining renderfarm.fi (just console text). Beeping/shaking/overheating stops, and his display is now in sync with the farm stats (moving smoother/faster). i.e. He's not so stressed out anymore.

Back to the planet shot, overlay host stats (burp+ore=4000 hosts?), features, speed improvement (render 2000 times faster with boinc). This would be where all the text, logos, & urls are overlaid. Maybe have a small spaceship fly through the shot.

That description is probably 6 months of work? :(

I'm not confident I could pull this off, so a community effort is a good idea.

Hey just an idea, but making this into a production on Wreckamovie.com could be a nice way of testing some of our future functionality with them. I've actually prepared a post on this subject a week ago, but as the integration is not fully operational I've postponed it's release for the time being. The guys are working full time on it tomorrow and the day after that actually.

Manu you got this idea so if you want to start and head the production, be my guest. :) We would probably get some people also from the Wreckamovie.com community to participate this way (cross-polynation).

WreckaMovie looks pretty serious (therefore intimidating) for me. I like the idea of a "tiny" project we can manage here. Submitting the various shots for rendering and composite offline.

Is there a thread about integrating renderfarm.fi with wreckamovie.com? (What's the plan?)

Good ideas.

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Do an "earth zoom" (from Finland) pulling out to show thousands of computers working together on a planetary scale. A reverse of something like this.

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Here's where the Renderfarm.fi is managed from.

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=60.222278,24.807311&spn=0.002105,0.006968&t=h&z=18

First of all, I´m glad about all your ideas and that you like to work on this project.

With what I write next I dont mean to trash your ideas, just as a guidline:

I need to say I got two main principles when it comes to projects:

1. A small finished project is better than a big unfinished. 

- I´ ve worked on some big projects with a friend of mine, most of them went into trash after month of work, cause they were to big to handle for 2 persons and no budget. I´ve been witnessing throughout "the scene", that many people fall into this trap. But after all it´s just waisted time.

2. Better create a less complex scene in high quality than a complex in poor quality.

- When producing high quality = eye candy, the least people will remember is "wow, that was awesome". The opposite, if you create something very complex, great story, but the quality is poor, most people wont even watch it till the end, and all they remember is "that was made poorly", with a pitifull smile ;)

So, I´m open to all of your ideas, but please lets keep it as simple as possible.

I also agree with overkill, let´s keep this inhouse. So far the staff seems pretty managable.

Talking about staff, lets give out positions. I´d say I take the part of modelling, rendering and compositing.

Whats needed:

Someone creating kind of a story board, at least gather all final ideas and arrange them in a clear timeline.

Someone finding CC-BY music that´s nice and fits, and also for audio editing.

Someone for video editing and typography (we wont have an actor for speaking, so explanational text should come in)

Someone good with texting and a 100% english.

Volunteers? :D

About the already mentioned idea of an earth zoom and desktop computers: I can create that, I already have a modelled PC and display at hand, as well as a textured earth, but for the earth I would need a rather high res CC-BY texture. Maybe someone can help with that.

My summary of all ideas is, the endless server tower represents the power of all PCs combined. Usually commercial farms got exactly like those towers, now we have to visualize that our pc-network equals or even surpasses that computing power. Maybe with typography/explanational text?

Great idea!

I would love to volunteer and do whatever is needed and I'm capable of (total blender rookie). Sadly I go on holliday tomorrow for the next 2.5 weeks. But probably after my hollidays there is some work left I could do. Until then just some thoughts I have:

I also think simple is good. It's always possible to make a second bigger, more complex version.But maybe, depending on how many peolple would contribute, some comlexibility is easy to get. If we would have a core team that asks for the objects that are needed everbody could pick a thing or two and construct it independetly.

For instance if we would follow the idea to show all the differend homecomputer that work together, we could ask everybody to make a model of their own desktop/laptop. One (with more skill and time) could also model their desktop or their computer room. One could model the earth, one could visualize the connection (internet) between all the computers around the world and so on.

I think the quality and success of the project highly depends on how good we cut the workload into many small pieces that can be worked on independently. The smaler the pieces are and the clearer it is what to do, the more people would contribut.

So it's the same as with rendering on renderfarm.fi itself!

I'm sure some of the better known blender artist would love to make a contribution, at least give us one of their old .blend files where they modelt their working environment.

I have to go now and pack my stuff. Sorry for having these ideas without beeing able to help for the coming weeks.

I´m sure we´re not done in 2.5 weeks, so enjoy your vacation and join us as soon as you get back :)

I can work on storyboarding my description if you think that's the one to use. I had also thought of shay-tal's idea of multiple computers, but figured that would require too much modelling. Easier to represent them as a point of light (or node on a network) on a planetary scale.

I like the idea of using existing data wherever possible (for the sake of finishing quickly). But I'm always confused when it's a "tribute" vs. a ripoff. I was playing around with an earth texture from blender-materials.org. It's public, yet uses textures from Nasa (not technically CC?). I quickly made the second half of an earth zoom with it.

And also (quickly) composited pine's "Ortho" character over it.

I've seen a lot of useful models submitted here, and I would think they'd agree to contribute to the project (either giving permission, or becoming actively involved). Call me lazy, but I think the faster the better, so it doesn't end up as another unfinished project.

EDIT: Just testing/fixing my iframe/embed issue.