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If you wish to support me, here’s my Patreon link:  
https://www.patreon.com/djthed
 
Paypal Alternative:  
https://goo.gl/YTgduc
 
 
Finally getting back into the swing of things. It’s been an incredibly long time since the last time I showed progress on this set. You can find the previous version here for comparison:  
https://www.deviantart.com/therealdjthed/art/4K-The-Mane-Attraction-WIP-8-Set-683193271
 
So, one of the main overall differences is instead of trying to copy the original shot to a tea, I’m now instead trying to interpret the original assets from the show into 3D in my own way that I think works best, while still holding true to the original in terms of the overall composition. Changes like this include the more detailed dynamic ground texture, the shining stars in the background, the smoke from a fog machine on the set (and yes, it’ll be animated simulated smoke in the final animation), and the more realistic take on the clouds. On top of that, there’s some more general improvements, like the stage lights feeling less fake than before, better color correction, and the depth of field being drastically lowered in intensity just due to how unreasonably intense it was before.
 
 
Unfortunately, rendering this set is still not cheap. At just 1080p, this rendered image took 73 minutes of straight rendering to complete. Just this one frame.
 
The main layer with the entire stage and the ground beneath it took 32 minutes to render (with 3072 samples).
 
The layer with the smoke from the fog machine took 18 minutes to render (with 8192 samples).
 
And the background layer took 23 minutes to render (with 768 samples). I still aim to optimize the background layer a bit more, but I’m still aiming to get about that render time, just with more samples.
 
 
So to put this in perspective, the animation will be rendered at 24 frames per second, and will last to 3-4 minutes. That’s about 4000-5000 frames. IF each frame took 73 minutes to render (which it won’t, it’ll vary), it’ll take 29 hours to render just ONE SECOND during the final render of the animation. For a full 4 minutes of this, it’ll take more than 200 DAYS of straight, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, worth of rendering on my main PC that has TWO Nvidia GTX 1070s carrying that load. And as you would expect, that’s an incredibly unreasonable ask to have me put my main PC that I use every day into slavery and render away for well over half a year.
 
This is why I want to stress that I really, really want to save up money to get more GPUs to put in other systems to sort of create my own local render farm. My goal right now is to get 6 more GTX 1070s, which will quadruple the rendering power I currently have, turning that 200 day render into a 50 day render, which is incredibly significant. And thankfully, the prices for the Nvidia GTX 10 series has gone down quite significantly as of late, so this isn’t something that’s out of the question. I could even get GTX 1080s if the money is right.
 
But again, unfortunately, money has been more tight lately because real life is a thing that exists. I can’t thank my current Patrons enough for the help they’ve given me, because if I didn’t have them now, I wouldn’t be able to be barely scraping by as is. But my current life situation isn’t allowing me to really save a whole lot of money per month.
 
I always feel weird asking this so directly, but if this project is going to happen, I’m going to need more help. I don’t want to ask others who are not in a good position to help someone financially, but for those who are able to, please consider helping me out. You can pledge to my Patreon page, and if you pledge $5 or more, you can join my Discord server where I share a lot of things that are behind the scenes as well as showing things early in that server, and it’s also one of the very first places I go to seek early feedback on my unreleased work as well:  
https://www.patreon.com/djthed
 
If Patreon isn’t your thing, you can also directly donate to me through Paypal:  
Donation Link:  
https://goo.gl/YTgduc  
Or you could do a direct money transfer to this email on Paypal to avoid donation fees:  
d.j.gomen@hotmail.com
 
Seriously, any amount of money will help me out so much.
 
I have lots of spare parts for PC builds, so all I really need is the GPUs. They are the most important part that I still need. I also luckily know a few people that are kind enough to help out with rendering with their own PCs, but it’s not going to be enough to reduce the render times enough to make it more reasonable on its own, and unfortunately online render farms like Sheep-It won’t work due to the use of scripts and file size limitations they have. So again, any help that I can get is massive. The only things I need are 6 GPUs, which the GTX 1070 can go as low as $300 a piece instead of the $450 they were just a few months ago, then I’ll be a lot more satisfied with the rendering capabilities that I have on my own. Otherwise, I don’t know how I’m going to do this in a reasonable amount of time. I don’t need all the money at once, I just need to earn enough each month to be able to save up to the amount I need.
 
 
And, really, seriously, Special thanks to my Patrons:  
BLANK3T  
Bastler  
StabeCoder  
JetWave  
StylinGreymon  
Scope  
MCtoastie  
Flopzee  
CyberPon3  
Katharine Berry

Comments

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SilentObserver

Perhaps look into buying a used RX 580 mining rig, a single 580 are not be as fast as a single 1070 but you can buy almost x2 580 for the price of one 1070, and would effectively spread the load over more instances in one go.  
A quick ebay search found x6 rx rigs for around $1000 and x4 GTX rigs for around $1250 (offers will vary obviously).
 
I’ll play around on a 12-core server I have access to and see if rendering is worth anything.
Dogman15
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@DJTHED  
That would be really cool if you could outsource and share the rendering tasks to all of your fans who are willing to help out with their PCs. I’d volunteer my computer for rendering when I’m away from home.
DJTHED
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@Phoen1x  
Right, yeah I knew he did something like that. I want to do something like this too, but with a more automated approach where a host server automatically assigns client PCs individual frames to render, instead of having to manually organize frame ranges for like, 5000 frames. Still not too sure how that’ll work yet but I’ve been looking into that as well.
Phoen1x
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If you’re comfortable releasing the .blend file, you could have the community render parts of it. It worked pretty well for creatorofpony when he did the 3D version of Awesome As I Want To Be, he just put the file up on Mediafire and people signed up for ranges of frames in a Google Docs spreadsheet.
 
If you don’t want to release the models to the general public yet, a few of your patrons probably have some decent GPU power available.