Is RT worth pursuing for high end interior CGIs?

[Alan Iglesias]

... I think the best thing to do is star the project from the outset with RT in mind, rather than throwing an existing project at it.

Yes -- this will be giving yourself the best chance for success, I feel. You will find yourself doing some things differently of course, but in the many years I have been doing this, the ability to find workarounds has been a major part of what I do, and I'd suspect you've been there as well.

As RT/GPU matures, there will be less and less a need...

Best of luck,

-Alan

[tricky]

Well, it helps to get your expectations right; it's certainly not the full V-Ray, but it can do a lot of things and can be helpful in many ways.

Best regards,
Vlado

Vlado

Would you say that the same amount of development goes into RT as with 'normal' Vray? Or is it less or more so? I know that over the years, errors/bugs/features have been added to vray (standard) quite regularly, and support is almost instant. Do you give the same level of support to RT?

[IVOR_IP]

I find the overall investment for GPU-based rendering relatively high versus traditional cpu-based farms. I think this is partly because of the resource optimization required for GPUs. The return of making a rack of cheap e3s or e5s or i7s blades is much cheaper since they can be leveraged for other purposes in the pipeline.

Haven't had a chance to try this out yet, but redshift is preparing a biased rendered, which probably will satisfy production workflow better.
http://www.redshift3d.com/products/redshift/

[tricky]

I find the overall investment for GPU-based rendering relatively high versus traditional cpu-based farms. I think this is partly because of the resource optimization required for GPUs. The return of making a rack of cheap e3s or e5s or i7s blades is much cheaper since they can be leveraged for other purposes in the pipeline.

Certainly worth considering. I reckon an i7 box with 32GB of ram could be built for around £500-600 each. We have a small farm at the moment - I'd just be concerned about network capability with so many packets of data being thrown around to so many computers.

[Morbid Angel]

concerned about network capability with so many packets of data being thrown around to so many computers.

I have a 7 machine farm with one of them being the main server and also my work station, I can dr any scene with no problem as well as read/write through the render manager/multiple frames on windows 7 x64 pro. I think you will be running into problems when you have 15+ machines you'd be looking at expanding your network as well as moving to another os. With that said, unless your scenes are hundreds of megabytes and require textures in gigabytes per scene, you don't need crazy network. I worked for a company that had 60 artists (60 workstations) and 300 render nodes working of of simple servers which just balanced the data/load between themselves. It wasn't smooth sailing but it worked.

At the facility I am in now, I have about 40 machines a mix of i7 3230k and 12 core xeons, and with DR and vray RT cpu I can get any interior or complex render done in an hour or two worth of render time (those are big interiors too)....something to consider

[fraggle]

Bercon tile textures, with or without multitexture

Not yet according to my test.