your opinion on this?? PCI expansion

[protovu]

Hi Simon and Thomas,
You guys would have an opinion on this, or perhaps find it interesting? I posted on the main forum.
Would love to know, thanks.

viewtopic.php?f=26&t=58243

[tschwenke]

Hi,

Looks interesting

Already thought about it, but decided not to do it because of the big distance between myself and the seller. So, I'm not a big help here

Best wishes,
Thomas

[protovu]

Thank you for taking a look, Thomas.
Best regards,
Rick

[Sighman]

You might want to consider building a second rig and using network rendering instead. The second rig does not need to be very powerful since the GPUs will be doing most of the work. You only need a standalone license for the second rig to enable network rendering. You will likely find it cheaper in the long run. Just pick a mother board that supports three double slot GPUs.

[protovu]

You might want to consider building a second rig and using network rendering instead. The second rig does not need to be very powerful since the GPUs will be doing most of the work. You only need a standalone license for the second rig to enable network rendering. You will likely find it cheaper in the long run. Just pick a mother board that supports three double slot GPUs.

Thanks, Simon. Kind of you to weigh in.
I have thought about a separate rig, and this is something I have done before with native Carrara rendering.
But, in this case, a big part of my concern is work flow. I really want a quicker response in terms of both mesh compilation and render. The fine tuning spectrum available with Octane is so vast that I find myself exploring all kinds of tangents and variations with Materials, and I have barely scratched the surface regarding path tracing and PMC. And, I am learning that some of the most attractive Materials are sluggish.
With that in mind, would a second rig be leveraged towards live work flow, or only network rendering?

And, pardon my ignorance, but are double slots capable of 2 video cards each? My xeon has 4 as you know, but I suppose they are single slot? I am also not sure I understand the difference between Expansion Backplanes and PCIe expansion clusters. They seem the same, minus the GPU holding frame for the Expansion Cluster? The vendors do not explain much.

Best regards,
Rick

[Sighman]

By double slot I mean that the graphics card takes up 2 PCI slots instead of one.

I'm afraid I don't know much about expansion options.

[protovu]

Thanks, Simon.
Would you say my thinking about work flow makes sense?

[tschwenke]

Hi Rick,

Just a quick opinion here on my part

If I understand you correct, you have problems with speed. In the past I learned that speed comes either from experience or from really expensive hardware. As you (perhaps) already know, motion blur and depth of field in the NATIVE Carrara render is just really slow. Adding it afterwards in After Effects is much faster; the result is almost the same. I think there are a hundred ways of doing something in Carrara + Octane. And when you add post-production via AE, Nuke, etc. you have at least 1000 ways

So, I don't know if this might be something of help for you, but perhaps you have a scene that you feel is so slow that only lots of hardware can do the job... It could be that someone can give a tip or something to speed up the rendering without adding a bunch of new hardware

Best wishes,
Thomas

[protovu]

Thanks, Thomas. I really appreciate your input. If there are tips links that come to mind, please email or post. Any way to speed up mesh compilation would help. Simple meshes are not always possible for me.
I do lower my sample rate while animating. This helps a little.

I do use some strategies that involve post production (I have stuck with Premiere for this), and I am certainly open to ideas.
That said, my preference would be to get things as close to final in Octane as possible.
The heavy burden of my work has to take place in the 3D viewport, I believe. Projects often involve mechanical interactions with organic forms, or hands manipulating devices.
Some the transparent organic forms have view changes and transparency shifts that occur simultaneously. These sorts of things get really difficult when split into separate files for later composite.

For example, if you have 3 minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk7wQ-TRhxI

You can see in this, that the burden is heavy all of the activity going on in the 3D viewport. Other than a few insets, not much I could do with AE..but maybe I'm wrong.

[tschwenke]

Hi,

Nice animation

By 3D viewport you mean the Carrara viewport or the Octane viewport?

Materials look good, but there are some glossy shaders that may take to long to render because of fireflies. Are you using the built-in Octane hotpixel remover?

Have you tried SSS for your organic materials? Teeth and other materials look a bit too glossy.

Question: Do you render static scenes again and again? For example, it seems to me that you render the whole image from 2:24 to 2:28, even if only this little screw driver is moving. IMHO, here, only the screwdriver should be rendered, not the whole scene.

Transparency in Octane is really slow. I usually do it in After Effects if possible.

Be that as it may, looks really good

Best wishes,
Thomas