Almost Here

I'm so excited, and a little anxious. My desktop that I referred to in my last post should arrive at my house sometime tomorrow! The GeForce 9800GTX+ was replaced with a GeForce GTS 250, which, for the 512MB cards, is basically a rebranded and smaller 9800GTX+. And after exploring PhysX, CUDA, and just modern game graphics, I'm more excited than ever for my computer to get here. Having the new Houdini 10 beta is also nice; as I'm sure it will be fun making smoke with 4 cores. However, I am a little anxious because after reading reviews it appears that sometimes CyberPower PCs arrive is, less than ideal conditions. Not everything is plugged in, something might be improperly mounted, or the worst, the PSU (Power Supply Unit) or another part is DOA (Dead on Arrival). But it also appears they've gotten better recently, I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow to see. If it is a little less than satisfactory, I guess I get what I pay for. I am currently prepared and able to deal with anything not plugged in to the motherboard, a DOA hard drive, anything not properly mounted, and that's it.

Signature; Desktop

As I somewhat insinuated in my previous post, DICE is a cool company and I am glad they make games for me and everyone else. And so to honor their awesomeness (and give myself a forums signature) I went and made this image.

http://flickr.com/photos/heydabop/3317351852/
 

Hope you like it.

 

Now on to my desktop. For a while now I've been saving up to buy a laptop, since my current laptop plays most newer games at 10-20FPS at lowest settings, needless to say, this takes away from the fun of the game. But today I figured I'd go browse desktops and see how they are these days. In about 10 minutes I lost all interest in buying a laptop. Sure the portability is great, but is it worth +$400? Not for me it isn't. So after looking around and picking and choosing carefully, I bought a desktop from CyberPower PC this afternoon. In order to take advantage of free shipping I had to skimp on a few things, like some RAM, an optical drive…and an OS. However, I can buy myself an optical drive soon after I get the computer, and I can install the Windows 7 beta (which is AMAZING) from a USB drive. What I did not skimp on was my video card and processor. My processor is an AMD Phenom X4 9850 2.5GHz, which will go great with SideFX Houdini. The video card is an NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX+ 512MB. I would've liked to get it with 1GB, but I wasn't sure if that was overkill for what I wanted, and I didn't have a whole bunch of money. So for the next 2 weeks or so, I will be greatly anticipating the desktop's arrival. But for now, I think I'll go play Battlefield 2142 at 20 FPS.

Pleasing People

Am I the only one who is appalled at how hard it is to please most people? I can think of many times I've witnessed this, but right now I'm thinking of one or two specific instances, centered around Battlefield Heroes and Battlefield 1943, two games being released by Electronic Arts and Digital Illusions CE. I'll start off with people's reaction to Battlefield Heroes. Yes, EA has missed their initial release date by months, but if it makes the game better is it worth it? In my opinion yes, and people shouldn't find reason to complain about it, but they do. They are currently holding a closed beta, which of course has many people yelling for a beta key to get in, or complaining that it is closed. Has it occurred to them that, this being a game in development that is completely online, it probably doesn't have many servers to run from? Apparently not, because they just yell and whine that the game isn't out and the beta is closed. O, one more thing, this game is and will be COMPLETELY FREE! Right there I think unless EA or DICE really messes something up, people lose most all room to complain. Now onto Battlefield 1943 and the lack of gratitude surrounding it. EA announced this game about 10 days prior to this writing, and it is the debut of the Frostbite engine on the PC. This allows almost complete destruction of buildings and other objects in the playing environment, which is great! However, people have already found ways to complain about it. Saying EA will just ruin it, or it isn't realistic enough. If people assume EA is going to ruin it, then chances are they will think it is ruined when it is released due to their current mood. I just don't see why they don't give EA a chance; they have yet to majorly mess up any Battlefield game from what I've seen. And if you want realism, go play America's Army, and if that is too real, go play Call of Duty. But really, complaining about a free game, or about a game that no one has any detailed information on? That's just childish and stupid. Thank you for reading.

Physically Based Rendering

After learning about Physically Based Rendering (PBR) in Houdini, I realized it is cool and useful, if one knows how to use it. PBR uses to physical properties of light, hence its name, to render scenes. This allows it to render with caustics and global illumination by the use of "photons". I knew how to do caustics before this, but using PBR makes it more straightforward. After reading up on PBR, I know most of my way around it, so for the past few days I've been messing with it, and here are the results all smashed into one image. All of these are low resolution and low quality renders, because I was just experimenting and didn't want to spend a lot of time rendering.

http://flickr.com/photos/heydabop/3252569754/

Match Moving

Due to my current sculpture project being harder than I had expected, I have taken a break from it, and instead tried some match moving. For those of you who don't know, match moving is taking film of (usually) a real scene, such as a road or a room, and analyzing it to create a virtual camera to put in a 3D scene. This allows the 3D program to render its model using the virtual camera, and the end result is a model that will fit well into the original footage since both the model and scene are being viewed from the same perspective. The result of my attempt to do this is this video. http://vimeo.com/3008967

Desktop; Twisted

Still no sign of my laptop, last week I was told the guy repairing it still hasn't gotten in contact with the people who gave him the motherboard last time. I have not heard anything since then so I have no idea when I'll be getting it back. In the mean time however, I have managed to get a 4 year old desktop from my friend. It is not exactly fast, but it is capable of doing what I want it to do until I get my laptop, and will be useful as a render farm node once I have my laptop. It has a 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading, 2GB of DDR-SDRAM PC-2700, an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200, and an 80GB 7,200RPM EIDE hard drive. So although I won't be doing any gaming, it is not much worse than my laptop, it is however good enough for SideFX Houdini 9.5. This brings me to my next subject, Twisted.

After I set the desktop up how I wanted it and installed the Windows 7 Beta, which I must add works very well and fast, I decided I'd install Houdini and mess around. I had a couple ideas, but most of them included dynamic simulations, which I didn't feel like using on this machine due to processor speed and memory constraints. So I just made a simple curve, copied it four times, rotating 90 degrees each time, added a PolyWire node to it, and subdivided it, which resulted in an interesting looking "sculpture". Once the model was finished, I gave it a silver material, and created a floor with a slightly modified cirrus marble material. I then set up my camera, added depth of field effects, and did some draft renders. Once I thought everything looked nice, I added an area light, and left my computer to render for five hours. The end result was what you see below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/heydabop/3231694220

I am currently working on another scene with a similar base idea. From the picture I have in my head, the new one will look better and have more detail than this one. I cannot take all credit for the new one, because after discussing this current one with my friend, he gave me some ideas for the new one, which I hope will come out looking very nice.

Ideas

Well it may be longer than I had expected until I get my laptop back, which is quite annoying. I have all these ideas of things to do in Houdini and Photoshop, but I can't do them until I have my laptop...

Void

Yes, I'm aware I have not posted anything for at least a month, I'm also aware this is my second post about how I had not posted for a while. My laptop was broken (fried GPU, and lucky me it's integrated into my motherboard) for almost a month from November-December, and it then broke again about a week ago, and I never started posting in the time it worked. I plan to resume regular posting once I get it back, which will hopefully be in about 2 weeks.

Killing Just to Save a few Bucks

Yesterday morning, Black Friday, as Wal-Mart employees tried to hold sliding doors back against a crowd of near 2,000, an employee was trampled. Multiple employees were holding the doors against the unruly crowd right before opening time, but the crowd burst through the doors, and in the process threw all of the employees back, and one to the floor. As the crowd ran by the employee struggling to breathe, other employees tried to get to him to help him. The man taken to the hospital, and died an hour after the crowd first came flying through the doors. Full Story

Is this what the American life has become? Groups of people willing to kill just to save some money on a Friday morning? What must other countries who already think we are unbelievably greedy be thinking of us now? I hope people realize that a person's life is priceless, and that destroying one to get a better price on something is an unbalanced, heartless decision. My heart and prayers go out to the family of this Wal-Mart employee. Bless them Lord.

Glow!

Glowing stuff seems to look nice most of the time. Therefore, it is nice to be able to make some. I just made some simple glowing spheres, and put them in a dynamic simulation so I did not have to worry about positioning them myself. The only thing I had really trouble with in this scene was parenting a lights to each of the dynamically translated objects. But thanks to the varomix on the SideFX forums, I was able to solve my problem. So I was able to create a decent quick animation, and a higher quality frame from it with global illumination.

Animation: http://vimeo.com/2133774

Frame: http://flickr.com/photos/heydabop/3000358717/

Obama Halloween Candy Analogy

Happy Halloween! And what's Halloween without one of the scariest things known to man, politics! The other day I heard an analogy of Obama's "spread the wealth" plan, with Halloween candy, so here it is.

A group of children has been trick-or-treating for almost two hours and they are getting tired, but they have bags full of candy for their work. They come upon a house, and knock on the door. The man who answers it asks them how much candy they have gotten. Excitedly they show him all their candy, saying they have been working hard for it, and they cannot wait to get home and eat it. However, the man, instead of giving them more candy, asks each of the kids for half of their candy, so he can give it to all the kids who did not go trick-or-treating. The kids of course do not like this idea, and quickly run away.

New Hard Drive

I decided to buy a new hard drive after I had run low on space, which I define as less than 10GB of free space, on my old drive. This would be second upgrade to my laptop. My last upgrade had been from 120GB to 160GB, both SATA 1.5Gbit/s at 5400RPM. (My 160GB would have been 3.0Gbit/s, but thanks to the lack of technical knowledge of HP's tech support, I was not sure if my computer could take it.) So this time I figured I better get more than I think I will need, so I will not have to upgrade again during my computer's lifetime.

After looking through prices of different manufacturers and their hard drives, I decided to go with a Western Digital (A somewhat biased decision) 320GB 7200RPM SATA3.0Gbit/s with a free-fall sensor (WD3200BJKT). (HP was able to tell me what I wanted to know after the second try this time.) Because I may drop my laptop one day, and the sensor only cost a little more compared to the one without. After ordering my hard drive online from provantage.com, it took only 3 days to arrive at my house.

Using a 2.5" external enclosure, I copied the contents from my old hard drive to my new one using Norton Ghost. However, while doing this I assigned the new drive's letter as H: in Vista, which turned out to be a dumb move. Once I had finished copying my old drive, I shut down my computer, took the old one out, and put the new one in. I turned on my computer and Vista boot up, but once it had, I ran into trouble. Vista would load almost nothing after its initial start, as everything was stored on C:, according to Windows, and I had marked my new drive as H:. I then spent the next three hours digging through my brain and futilely trying all I could think of to change the drive letter as it was assigned in Vista. I knew how to do so if I was given a command prompt, but I couldn't get one as Vista would search C: for explorer.exe and cmd.exe, and C: wasn't there. I finally decided I would try to copy my old drive again, giving Vista no knowledge of the new drives existence. I switched the drives in my computer and again copied my old drive to my new one using CloneZilla. When I started Vista with the new drive in again, it worked perfectly.

After feeling like an idiot by making a simple, but problematic mistake when coping my drive, I was ready to benchmark my new one against my old one. I had already benchmarked my old drive using PC Wizard 2008 and HD Tune, running both twice. I went ahead and benchmarked my new hard drive in the same way. All HD Tune benchmarks were done with Windows running in safe mode, to minimize other programs using the disk. I have posted the results below.

I have been using my new drive since the 24^th, and I am very pleased with it and have found no problems, except the ones I caused. The speed increase is noticeable in everyday use, and having double the space I used to have is very liberating. Thank you Western Digital and provantage.com

Old:

HD Tune 1: http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/4142/1sthdtunebenchmarkwdcwdqa3.png

HD Tune 2: http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/9448/2ndhdtunebenchmarkwdcwdrs9.png

PC Wizard 1: http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/5872/old1ee5.png

PC Wizard 2: http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/4854/old2qv6.png

 

New:

HD Tune 1: http://img119.imageshack.us/img119/7852/1sthdtunebenchmarkwdcwdde0.png

HD Tune 2: http://img119.imageshack.us/img119/8168/2ndhdtunebenchmarkwdcwdav9.png

PC Wizard 1: http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/2391/new1ys3.png

PC Wizard 2: http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/8379/new2on3.png

Happy National Mole Day

From 6:02AM to 6:02PM today is National Mole Day! Some of you may be wondering why it is only 6:02AM to 6:02PM. Well, this Mole Day is not about the moles that dig up your yard, it is about the moles that make up matter, and a mole is approximately 6.02 x 10²³ atoms or molecules, depending on which you are measuring. So, if you write the date as time then month then day, you get 6:02 10/23, which is like 6.02 x 10²³, this is why National Mole Day only lasts from 6:02AM to 6:02PM. So to celebrate, go get some concentrated sulfuric acid, H₂SO₄, and sucrose (sugar), C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁, then put them together and make some solid carbon!* I won't go into detail why this happens, for I don't entirely know, but sulfuric acid will combine with water, and since sucrose has twice as many Hydrogen atoms as it does Oxygen atoms, just like water, it's like carbon and water. The sulfuric acid will rip the water from the sucrose, leaving separated carbon and water. The water will then boil off as steam, for this reaction is very hot, and the carbon will become a porous piece of solid carbon. So there is your simple, incomplete chemistry example.

 

*I suggest that you do not actually go and do this. In the event you go and do this and end up hurting yourself or someone else, I cannot be held responsible in any way. If you do this, then you do so at your own risk. Again, I am not responsible in any way at all for anything that may happen if you do this. This includes, but is not exclusive to, causing you or another being harm, or any property damage that may result.

Folding

Objects abilities to fold up are usually taken for granted, as it has become very common for an object to fold up. Scooters fold up, computers fold up, puzzles can fold up, a few trailers can fold up, glasses fold up, some flying discs fold up, ironing boards fold up, knives fold up, tool sets fold up, tricycles fold up, tents fold up, and I think you get the idea. Nevertheless, this next item is still surprising to me. It is a good idea, and I am surprised it was not thought of sooner; Microsoft has developed a fold up, wireless computer mouse. It folds up to 60% of its original size to save a little space for portability, and then one can un fold it to get a full sized desktop mouse. I do not see how that little of a size difference could matter, but someone will buy it.

While writing this article I did find a fold up mouse from Japan, so Microsoft isn't the first to do it, but theirs will probably be used more, and I think it looks more comfortable, and looks better.

Global Anti-Piracy Day

Today is Global Anti-Piracy Day hosted by Microsoft. Anti-Piracy Day's goal is to educated people about illegal, pirated software, and to enforce current piracy laws. Some people who attended the educational events learned that they had unintentionally purchased counterfeit versions of Windows through auction sites, even after being told they were a genuine version. Microsoft reimbursed these people with genuine versions of Windows, and many of them appear to be pleased by this action. Action was also taken against resellers in multiple countries that had been selling illegal copies of Windows and Office.

Global Anti-Piracy Day Virtual Pressroom

 

Microsoft DreamSpark

I recently read that Microsoft was offering some of their development software free to students. I got excited when I read this, but when I went to the Microsoft site, in order to verify I was a student, I had to be going to one of the colleges they had listed. I am not in college and I almost gave up, but I saw a link to an alternate verification method. Luckily, high school students are able to participate in this program thorough the alternate verification. So I went and verified myself, and now I am legally downloading professional software from Microsoft free. Thanks a ton Microsoft! To go and download this stuff yourself, go to https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/.

Green Glass Dodecahedrons

I started working on making a frame from my Dodecahedron Rain into a nice still image with glass dodecahedrons and a floor texture two days ago. First, I had to work on putting a material on the dodecahedrons, and this was new to me, since I had used a dynamic simulation to clone the objects, instead of a normal clone operator. I will not go into deep details, but it took me a little while to get the material to work because of the odd configuration. After I learned how to get a material on a dynamically cloned object, I had to find the material I wanted, and then configure and fine-tune it to suit my needs. Once I had done this, I found a frame that looked like it would make a nice still image. I then set up the lighting, using one point light to generate photons for caustics, and an area light for shadows and normal lighting. With the lighting all ready to go, I went ahead and generated a photon map. Luckily, I was familiar with the controls and this took little time to configure. After I let to photon map render, I double-checked all the settings, saw I was ready for a final render, and started rendering.

As of this writing 53% of the image has been rendered and the rest is still being rendered. When I set up the scene, I knew it would take a long time to render, since I allowed a maximum of 10 reflections and 10 refractions for the glass material, and there are a few groups of multiple glass objects in the scene. Tracing a light ray through multiple reflections and refraction can be computer intensive. However, I never expected a time as long as this; it has been rendering for 17 hours as of this writing. I also think that the second half of this image will take longer to make, because there are more glass dodecahedrons in it. Therefore, it could be another 24 hours at least before I get a finished image. The first half looks good, so I am assuming the rest will.

UPDATE: It has now been 33 hours and 30 minutes since I started rendering this image, and it is 73% done.

UPDATE 2: 36 hours after rendering start, the image is 85% complete, and I think there are no more densely populated parts of the image, so it should be done by this afternoon; in roughly 6-10 hours.

I hope that nothing happens while the image is rendering, as it is going only to my RAM, and not onto my hard drive. This might not have been the best decision, but I wanted to be able to look at the image while it was being rendered, and as far as I know, I can only do this without saving it to my hard drive as it is rendered. If I were saving it to my hard drive as it rendered, and something crashed, I would at least have half an image, and I could just render the rest of it, instead of all of it again. I am hoping that sometime I will find out how to make mantra, the rendering program, output to two places, such as a live view, and a file on the hard drive.

On a side note, my laptop processor has been overclocked by 21% this whole time, so I guess this is a nice stress test too, and so far, my processor is passing. Although the temperature is getting high, with one core at 78°-80°C (172°-176°F) and the second core at 74°-76°C (166°F-169°F), assuming my temperature readings are correct, which I believe they are.

FINAL UPDATE: After a hot (for my processor) 38 hours, the image is finally done. I will post it soon. I was surprised at how fast my processor temperature dropped; it went down 20°-25°C in about 3 minutes.

To see the final render, go to http://flickr.com/photos/heydabop/2947837408/.

Houdini’s RBD Simulation

After doing many complicated (to me) projects, I chose to do something simple that I assumed would not take long to set up, a simple Rigid Body Dynamics simulation. It consists solely of dodecahedrons being generated at random spots and falling to the ground. It took only fifteen minutes to calculate the 600 frames of the animation. It could have done it even faster, but it saved every frame to disk, which apparently takes a lot of time to do, because the first 31 frames took a minute, yet I can make it calculate the first frames in real time at over 24 FPS if I don't save to disk. I rendered it at a low quality, since it is not anything special in the first place.

Final Video: http://vimeo.com/1942465

I might do a single frame render later on, where all of the dodecahedrons are glass, with a floor texture, better shadows, and a higher resolution.

Collisions 2

After posting my problem that I explained in my last entry in the Side Effects forums, I received an answer from Allegro, who I believe is a Side Effects employee. From what I have seen of Allegro's posts, he seems to know what he's talking about. So I read through what he had posted, understanding most of it. I could not look at the file attached to his post, as I was short on time.

I returned later and downloaded his file. I opened it to find a high quality collision mesh of my geometry. Pleased with what Allegro had made I went on to fine tune my fluid simulation. After computing the simulation, I then foolishly rendered it without actually watching it all of it. I had to do some test renders of the first frame to get lighting down, and get a good render time to quality ratio. After I set up the lighting and render quality, I rendered all of the simulation. I kept checking on my computer every few minutes to see how far it was, and see if everything looked good. It took about two hours to render, and once it was done, I played the finished sequence. I was not happy with what I saw. You could only see the water drop in two frames of the 24 FPS sequence, and it settled in its container in about ten frames. Frustrated with myself for not checking my simulation before I rendered it, I started to think about how to slow down the drop. However, I quickly decided to work on it later. So far, all I have thought of doing is increasing the scene's scale. I will see how that works in a day or two.

Thanks for fixing my collision mesh, Allegro.

Collision Thread: http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=13588

Collisions

I have been trying to make a scene in Houdini where a drop of water falls about three meters, and then splashes into an oddly shaped container. It has not been going as well as I would have hoped. First, I had to make it so the particles were not being formed uniformly, because then I would get a uniform splash and it would look fake. Looking though controls on the emitter node for a little while solved that problem when I found jitter. I then added drag to the particles, and I was inexperienced with drag, so that took a little learning too.

Now, most of these problems I have just listed were not too big, and were easy to solve. However, I have one big problem that has been hounding me throughout this whole project, and I have yet found a way to solve it. The container that the drop of water is falling into is not a simple or normally shaped container. It looks somewhat like a modern squashed glass vase. This is hard to represent well in a collision mesh, and still being relatively new to Houdini, I am having trouble doing so. It would be easier if I did not have to represent interior features, but I do, or else the container is not container, and is then worthless. I have been using the trial and error method, but this is not the best method, since each collision geometry takes anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours to generate. So, I have posted my problem on the Side Effects Houdini Forums, which is full of great, helpful people, and hoping someone there knows a way to get an accurate collision mesh for my geometry.

Container: http://img56.imageshack.us/img56/5651/containeret0.png

Resulting Collision Geometry: http://img56.imageshack.us/img56/9083/collisiongeometrydr3.png