Blender Projects and Studio Themed Intros - Page 13

This is great! Thank you Eubank for sharing your projects.

I certainly hope I didn't come across as accusatory earlier by hinting that I'd made the Disney intro. The whole reason I release my projects here is to see other people make use of them, whether they prefer the direct lift approach, or whether they modify and improve upon the original. As I stated before I like the lens flare that you added, and it's always nice to see someone else making use of the work in whatever form pleases them. There should be no guilt involved for using that which was intentionally made available.

One question about your zip file that I downloaded from w84no1. It appeared at first glance that you had 4-5 project files in there, but then you have music files for Dreamworks, Touchstone and Pearl&Dean with no associated project file for those? Unless I'm mistaken your Touchstone intro was also originally mine (and is hosted by W84no1) so that's covered, but I know I'm not the only one who wants to play with your Dreamworks project. That one you mentioned was made in After Effects as well which means I don't have to download and learn C4D I'd love to get my hands on it.

Thanks again for sharing all of this. I may have to look into C4D and see if I can do anything with a few of your projects, but right now time is so hard to find...

DevilDog1980,
I'm sorry that it took me a while to find your post, but you beat me to posting the solution. I made that Disney intro in Blender 2.42a and it renders fine there and in (some?) previous versions. Atagert was able to determine for the last person who asked that newer versions of Blender don't render the sparkle properly. His post was deleted with the database loss, and none of us know why newer versions don't render it right. The sparkle is created by a particle generator so I guess the Blender crew changed something about how the generator works in later versions...?

Also, the Universal text that comes around the sphere as an arc is not "text" thus is can't be edited like text. It's actually a mesh that has to be totally replaced. I uploaded instructions with my original version of the Universal logo (something like page 2-3 of the Universal thread) that describe how to create your own text, convert to a mesh, warp it to the arc shape, and animate it to come around the earth. In my version there was an armature bone that did the rotation for you, so you just had to parent your finished text to the bone if I recall correctly. Atagert, MikeFalz, and others then made their own versions of the Universal logo, some based on mine and other started from scratch. The instructions are probably pretty applicable no matter whose version of the intro you're using, but you'd have to figure out what may be different in your version. I think Atagert's version also had instructions with it, so I would recommend playing with his or mine until you're comfortable, then trying to apply the knowledge gained to the newer cooler version that you're currently trying to render.

Hope that helps!

There are a few things you can try to improve your render times. In Blender 2.42 which is what I use there is a button labeled "threads" that you want to enable if you have 2 or more cores. This button in on the "output" tab in the "scene" (F10) menu, which is also where the big Render and Anim buttons are. You shouldn't be able to miss it on the left side of the screen. Enabling the button forces Blender to render in 2 (and unfortunately *only* 2) threads.

If you have a newer version of Blender, this threads enable/disable button was replaced with a field that you can input a number of threads from 1 to 8 and force Blender to render in that many threads. In prior experiments I found no improvement setting this to 4 on a dual-core machine, so just set it to however many processors you have for best results.

Finally, check out optimized Blender builds at www.graphicall.org. I take no credit for that find, I believe it was Atagert who discovered it, but regardless those builds were shaving 20-30% off most people's render times back when we were doing the Universal and Disney intros. I cant stand editing my project files in those builds, but I always pop one open before clicking the final Anim button .

I previously posted a bunch of trials that I had run comparing stock Blender to an optimized build, as well as comparing threads on/off and set to different values, as well as comparing my machine at stock speeds and overclocked. I don't recall the exact results but I do remember that overclocking led to an almost exactly linear decrease in render time, and when you compounded that with the reductions for optimized builds and multi-threading render times could be unbelievably fast as compared to stock Blender. Definitely play around with some or all of the above.

I decided to search for my old posts on making Blender render faster and apparently my memory was slightly off. Overclocking did not produce a linear decrease in render times, but it did help. Also I forgot to mention that setting Xparts and Yparts properly for the scene you're rendering can make a big difference.

Here is the first post where I hadn't yet discovered the threads button and was asking for help, but had run some timing experiments:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...1#post11106351

About 6 posts down from there you'll find my second post after DenW kindly pointed me to the threads button and I re-ran some of the tests. Personally I think there's quite a bit of valuable information there, as even neglecting overclocking I was able to reduce my render times to half, and with a little overclock got them down under a third. That really makes a difference over a 20+ hour span

And here goes 3 posts in a row...

I actually had to rerender my own FOX intro and I'd been putting it off but because of the last few posts I decided to go ahead and do it and run a few tests before I kicked off the render for the night.

All the numbers I will provide below are for rendering frame 461 of the FOX intro in 1920x1080 resolution on my 1.8GHz C2D in WinXP Pro.

Vanilla Blender 2.42a (my standard version) took 2:12.10 with Xparts & Yparts set 4. Setting them both to 2 worsened the render times by 5-6% in all tests so I'll just post results of the 4x4 tests below.

An SSE2 optimized build of Blender 2.46 that I use for my final renders took 1:34.32. That's a 28.6% reduction in render time. I should note as well that there is a render error in the lower right spotlight caused by the newer version of Blender, but I know how to fix that when I render it for real .

I then decided to try overclocking again, so I bumped my CPU to 2.4GHz, but left the memory at the same 800MHz via divider. This time the vanilla Blender took 1:38.84, so the 33.3% overclock gave me a ~25% decrease in render time. The optimized build this time only took 1:11.81, which is also little less than a 24% decrease compared to before the overclock. At least they're pretty consistent.

So in conclusion, when comparing the overclocked optimized build at 1:11.81 to the vanilla build at stock speeds at 2:12.10 it totaled over 45% reduction in render time, which is not too shabby. I'm kicking off the whole 690 frame animation now so assuming those times are a representative average for all the frames in the animation, I'm expecting it to take 13h46m instead of the 25h20m it would have otherwise taken.

I could pump the CPU up higher but either way we're talking about an overnight render, and my only concern was to have it finish before I get home from work tomorrow instead of taking 24 hours or more.