Inner Circle Update for November 8 2016!

Hey guys!

So, this has been a weird week (at least for me).   I started out with the intention to upgrade my workstation PC and have kind of been all over the place since.  AltairPL has continued to lay groundwork for the upcoming battle overhaul, and TK has been banging out work on the Access Tunnels maps.  See below for details!

Images and Content for this Post on Google Drive

New Rendering and Workstation PC

Prepare for a really geeky lecture, and if any of you guys are into computer hardware I'd really like your take on this!

After I completed the Render Manager plugin last month I unlocked a whole lot of potential for automation with Daz Studio.  Unfortunately, my current PC is a mid-range gaming PC and is not at all a suitable professional 3D workstation.  So, at the beginning of the month I decided it was time to bite the bullet and upgrade.  The first thing to know about 3D workstations is that they are really freaking expensive (hence why I've been holding off).  To have one built would start in the $5k range (and wouldn't include what I want), so naturally I'm looking to build my own.  I discovered pretty quickly that there was a lot to learn about these systems, so I spent at least two days just researching the hardware components.  Some of the unique requirements of these kinds of systems (and how they relate to us) are as follows:

• Rendering rigs require a lot of processor cores.  The more the better since rendering is highly parallel (and so are a lot of other functions in 3D/media programs).  To maximize effectiveness, the system needs two processors (not two cores, but two physical processors -- each ranging from 8 to 22 cores, meaning a total of 32 to 88 threads).
• High core count processors innately have slow clocks.  This means that the performance of single-thread programs suffers.  If I was just using this machine for rendering this wouldn't be a huge deal, but this is an all around workstation.  This means that to keep single thread program performance high I would ideally get well rounded out (read expensive) processors.  Unfortunately, due to a pretty lengthy Daz performance testing session TK and I performed a few nights ago, we discovered that this problem is more severe than I initially thought, as a whole lot of necessary functions rely on a single thread (very stupid I might add).
• The above mentioned "high clock, high core/thread" processors are exponentially more expensive than those that have just a high clock and just a high core count.  What's this mean for us?  eBay, probably.  It's not uncommon to see these processors pulled from new servers in good condition and sell for around half their retail price.  Unfortunately my offers so far haven't worked out, so I'm still looking.
• These things require shit tons of RAM.  Dual processor motherboards cap out at around 1TB of RAM.  Part of this is because each processor needs its own memory bank, so if you want a dual processor system to behave like a 32GB single processor system under stress, then you need 64GB of RAM.

So, what will going through all of this trouble help with?  It will at least allow for:

• Two to three times the rendering speed of my current machine
• Faster processing with anything Photoshop related.
• Greatly increased speed for rendering multiple scenes simultaneously 
• Greatly improved workstation performance while either rendering is occurring or while multiple Daz scenes / Photoshop / etc. are open (better multitasking)
• Better viewport performance in Daz (though, this isn't as reliant on the GPU as I had hoped, so I'll be looking at future software based optimizations in the future for this)
• Faster scene loading in Daz (to open the scene used in the campaign's cover page image takes around 4 minutes on my current system)
• Removing the need for using my laptop as a secondary rendering PC.

If you check the GDrive link above you'll find an Excel spreadsheet that includes my research on all the hardware, my requirements, and current target build.  If any of you know where I can get Xeon E5-26XX V3 or V4 processors at a reasonable price, let me know!    

Render Settings Testing

I decided since I was putting so much effort into a new computer I should also take a more in depth look at squeezing better render speeds by adjusting settings.  I had checked it out a few months ago, but only since I've gotten a handle on scripting Daz has it become more practical to automate render settings.  The end result of the testing is that I can potentially improve speed by a whopping 40% with really minimal quality loss.  The loss in quality is most apparent in areas where displacement maps are used, but even then it's only noticeable in the high resolution versions when zoomed in.  

New Promotional Video

When not scouring eBay for processors, I've been fighting video recording programs and getting footage for a new promotional video that we will hopefully being working on this Saturday.  I say hopefully since the sound/video editor guy is a tough one to tie down, but we'll see how it goes.  While it's not anything new for you guys, I've posted a few snippets I plan on using.  One thing that is new however is that some are in widescreen format (since online video players use 16:9 aspect ratio and borders suck).  Before you get too excited, making this a possibility for the full game has some really big obstacles.  It's something I'd like for us to eventually accomplish, but it's still unclear whether it will be possible or not.  But damn it looks nice (minus the FRAPS watermark).

Also, if anyone has any recommendation for a solid video recording app please fill me in!  I'm using a combination of FRAPS and Nvidia's built in recording software, but both have their issues (FRAPS is lossless and makes stupid huge files, and Nvidia's only works in fullscreen mode... and the game will only work in widescreen using windowed mode).