Here are the first three of a decent number of textures being produced to be
used with my coating macros [corrosion/moss-vine/ice-icicles-slush-snow/bla
bla].

I just wanted to give a status update on the progress of this since that is only
fair to the folks who have contributed texture elements or otherwise helped make
this happen in one way or another over the years [I do not know why I only use
POV in the winter].

The macros I make are not really intended to be any sort of art on their own, no
more than oil paints are to a finished work, but instead are offered as tools
for others.

The two S.E. Day SSLT texture derivations take little time to render [on the
order of 1-2 hours], but the one on the far right took over 11 days on the
machine listed at the end, with the programs running below that.

The macro which produced the coating can accept an array of parameters, and if
your machine is beast enough you can texture each array row separately,
including interior. But good god its slow.

All I know is my next machine will have a second x5660 and another 24gb in this:
http://www.evga.com/articles/00537/

Machine:
Xeon 5660DP [6 core/12 hyper threading/2.8ghz] (only $400 lol!)
http://ark.intel.com/products/47921/Intel-Xeon-Processor-X5660-(12M-Cache-2_80-GHz-6_40-GTs-Intel-QPI)
in an Intel DX58SO2 with 24gb Kingston DDR3 triple channel matched set and SLI
NVidia cards having more RAM than I'll ever need.

Software overhead:
4 other rendering instances of POV-Ray, 1 of Mathematica, 50+ Chrome tabs, 8ish
instances of VS2010-2013 Ultimate, Processing, IntelliJ, UE Studio, etc..

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Attachments:
Download 'threeofsix.png' (365 KB)

Preview of image 'threeofsix.png'

And it took me since 2007 to finally track down the original source of the Slope
texture shell which has been so very useful to me [pouring through backup cd's,
zipdisks, and etc.. until I found my copy of the scene file], but now that I
have, it is time to give credit where it is due.
Bob Hughes [anyone else remember him?] posted this:
http://203.29.75.35/povray.binaries.animations/thread/%3C3982effb@news.povray.org%3E/?ttop=295282&toff=1400

From which I extracted what would become the basis of all of my slope based
textures.

Ian

"[GDS|Entropy]" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Here are the first three of a decent number of textures being produced to be
> used with my coating macros [corrosion/moss-vine/ice-icicles-slush-snow/bla
> bla].
>
> I just wanted to give a status update on the progress of this since that is only
> fair to the folks who have contributed texture elements or otherwise helped make
> this happen in one way or another over the years [I do not know why I only use
> POV in the winter].
>
> The macros I make are not really intended to be any sort of art on their own, no
> more than oil paints are to a finished work, but instead are offered as tools
> for others.
>
> The two S.E. Day SSLT texture derivations take little time to render [on the
> order of 1-2 hours], but the one on the far right took over 11 days on the
> machine listed at the end, with the programs running below that.
>
> The macro which produced the coating can accept an array of parameters, and if
> your machine is beast enough you can texture each array row separately,
> including interior. But good god its slow.
>
> All I know is my next machine will have a second x5660 and another 24gb in this:
> http://www.evga.com/articles/00537/
>
> Machine:
> Xeon 5660DP [6 core/12 hyper threading/2.8ghz] (only $400 lol!)
>
http://ark.intel.com/products/47921/Intel-Xeon-Processor-X5660-(12M-Cache-2_80-GHz-6_40-GTs-Intel-QPI)
> in an Intel DX58SO2 with 24gb Kingston DDR3 triple channel matched set and SLI
> NVidia cards having more RAM than I'll ever need.
>
> Software overhead:
> 4 other rendering instances of POV-Ray, 1 of Mathematica, 50+ Chrome tabs, 8ish
> instances of VS2010-2013 Ultimate, Processing, IntelliJ, UE Studio, etc..

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Ok.. When I said, "frost some donuts", I didn't mean with literal ice! 
The kind of help you end up getting these days... lol

-- 
Commander Vimes: "You take a bunch of people who don't seem any 
different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get 
this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem."

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Haha! :D

Yeah, the torus is actually a pretty effective test shape when vertically
oriented, as it has that nice handle. ;)

Ian

Patrick Elliott <kag### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Ok.. When I said, "frost some donuts", I didn't mean with literal ice!
> The kind of help you end up getting these days... lol
>
> --
> Commander Vimes: "You take a bunch of people who don't seem any
> different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get
> this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem."

Post a reply to this message

On 5-2-2014 5:01, [GDS|Entropy] wrote:
> Bob Hughes [anyone else remember him?]

Yes, and that reminded me of a scene file posted by him in 2003 ;-)

I revisited and posted an update in p.t.scene-files.

Thomas

Post a reply to this message

On 5-2-2014 1:20, [GDS|Entropy] wrote:
> The two S.E. Day SSLT texture derivations take little time to render [on the
> order of 1-2 hours], but the one on the far right took over 11 days on the
> machine listed at the end, with the programs running below that.
>

Pheeww...! The far right is by far the best but a bit impractical in 
terms of render time :-)

Thomas

Post a reply to this message

"[GDS|Entropy]" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> ... more RAM than I'll ever need.

That's what I used to think.

Post a reply to this message

> "[GDS|Entropy]" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
>> ... more RAM than I'll ever need.
>
> That's what I used to think.
>
>
There was a time when 1 Mb was though to be more than you, or anyone, 
would EVER POSSIBLY need... and a 1 Gb disk drive was an "Only in your 
wildest dreams" thing.

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Hi(gh)!

On 05.02.2014 01:20, [GDS|Entropy] wrote:

> All I know is my next machine will have a second x5660 and another 24gb in this:
> http://www.evga.com/articles/00537/

Oh yes... it was just last summer that I found out that even 16 GiB RAM 
are not enough to render even one of these 3600 x 3600 measuring points 
ASTER Earth DEMs from the Japanese Space Agency as a curved mesh2... up 
to now, I have to content myself with a reduced resolution of 2600 x 
2600! I surely would need at least 24 GiB to render only one tile... and 
about 128 GiB to correctly render an animation of a full-tilt overland 
journey across Afghanistan (you know, Khyberspace!) - from the highest 
mountains and passes, one can look at least two tiles far!

And, of course, the CPU should be an AMD K10 hexadeka-core running at 5 
GHz (currently a K10 hexa-core at 3.853 GHz)...

See you in Khyberspace!

Yadgar

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Le 08/02/2014 05:56, Jörg 'Yadgar' Bleimann nous fit lire :
> Hi(gh)!
> 
> On 05.02.2014 01:20, [GDS|Entropy] wrote:
> 
>> All I know is my next machine will have a second x5660 and another
>> 24gb in this:
>> http://www.evga.com/articles/00537/

Nice. Better buy both xeon at the same time (or be prepared to have to
replace the old one with a fresh one when adding the second:
availability of identical & compatible xeon is not warranted).
btw, xeon are not cheap (but pretty nice) when compared to i3/i5/i7.

> And, of course, the CPU should be an AMD K10 hexadeka-core running at 5
> GHz (currently a K10 hexa-core at 3.853 GHz)...

But K10 is not compatible with xeon-socket, and it's old technology
(Bulldozer / Piledriver continue the serie)
some opteron 6200 (8 modules, 16 "cores")... but they top at 3.6GHz in
turbo mode... full load is less than 3 GHz.

while dreaming... Abu-Dhabi opteron 16 cores (2x4 modules) are
quad-processor ok. (Interlagos too)
Just need a naughty motherboard with 4 sockets... and a damn budget for
the cooling and the power supply (at 140W per cpu, you can sell on ebay
your old heater!)

--
Only have 24GB ram, and 6HT/12 cores... It's small, but it was affordable.

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