I'm not saying there aren't powerful laptops out there, I just don't think the compact form is good for this kind of thing. The main issue I have with laptops is cooling. If you can keep your CPU and GPU temps down with a lot of case fans, you can get faster render times because, as we all know, hot processors don't work as well. However, in their compact design, it's hard to keep a laptop cool. Cooling pads work somewhat, but only to a certain extent. I have the same issue with all in ones. It's just too much stuff that generates heat crammed into a smaller space than you get with a tower. In fact, all in ones may even be worse, since your screen is even closer to your CPU, GPU, RAM etc. than it is with a laptop.
I'm not saying there aren't powerful laptops out there, I just don't think the compact form is good for this kind of thing. The main issue I have with laptops is cooling.
That's why ROG laptops are designed like this (scroll down a bit). My ROG actually stays cooler than my desktop, which is air-cooled out the whazoo. It's a pretty incredible feat of engineering.
That's why ROG laptops are designed like this (scroll down a bit). Mike ROG actually stays cooler than my desktop, which is air-cooled out the whazoo. It's a pretty incredible feat of engineering.
Nice. I hadn't seen one of those before. Usually, stuff that's designed for gaming is good for CGI as well.
That's why ROG laptops are designed like this (scroll down a bit). My ROG actually stays cooler than my desktop, which is air-cooled out the whazoo. It's a pretty incredible feat of engineering.
Funny you should mention the ASUS ROG series. I'm using an older model right now. Unfortunately it was the 'Best Buy edition' so it has the worst monitor known to man. It's rocking a Core i7 though so I've been able to brute force my way through this project. My desktop has a 600-series nVidia which works about the same as the 560M from my Asus.
I'm looking at a 900-series gpu for my upgrade. As far as I can tell, just about anything 700-series or up will be a welcome improvement
Using 3DS Max, I don't know how Blender renders, but for Max, the only thing I've noticed a better GPU with, is viewport performance, rendering itself still seems to be on the CPU side.
However, your model is coming along very very very nicely.
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 12GB 1TB NVMe SSD, 2 x 1GB SATA SSD, 4TB external HDD 32 GB RAM Windows 11 Pro
The Cycles rendering engine in Blender has the ability to use your GPU for rendering, as opposed to the CPU, if your graphics card is compatible. (mine isn't) Since GPUs are made to render game assets in real time, a really good one can beat the pants off of a CPU.
I was messing around with Blender a few weeks ago, which is the only reason I even know this.
That's why ROG laptops are designed like this (scroll down a bit). My ROG actually stays cooler than my desktop, which is air-cooled out the whazoo. It's a pretty incredible feat of engineering.
I've got an ROG G74SX that I love even though it is rather large.
There's light at the end of the wormhole! Thank you all for your feedback.
Exterior modeling and shading are pretty close to done. Now to deal with the windows, VIP lounge, shuttle bay, and the arboretum.
I've got some bizarre artifact issue occurring around the rim on the port and starboard extreme. It only shows up during renders so it's proving a bit challenging to squash. I will whip this into shape tomorrow morning.
I'm still overjoyed at how authentic the shader feels when the oblique lighting throws up the hints of the colors underneath. You can see a hint of it playing off the starboard warp nacelle in this shot.
Just a short way to go now, relative to how long I've been working on this project. Soon I will get to play with animating this beauty. I cannot wait!
I don't think I've seen anybody get closer to the hull material than you have. You managed to capture the look of the iridescent paimt they used for the first film. :thumb:
I don't think I've seen anybody get closer to the hull material than you have. You managed to capture the look of the iridescent paimt they used for the first film. :thumb:
I am quite flattered, thank you! The shaders for the hull have been one of my greatest challenges in Blender. I don't think I have a full grasp of Cycles nodes yet so what I've achieved to date has been brute force and endless tweaking. It is my hope that with practice I can simplify them considerably without sacrificing the polish of the results.
I did some experimenting Saturday morning and rapidly came to the conclusion that simply applying an emission shader to the windows looks like crap. To do this right, I'm going to need to build a little bit of interior for each window and light them properly.
I'll have some test shots posted this evening but for now I have only one image of the new lounge. Canon reference material for this is very limited. I've decided to skip the 70's decor from the concept sketches and opted for more of a "Wrath of Kahn" aesthetic.
I also discovered the source of the artifacts I was seeing on the lower saucer. Apparently one of my tweaks to the saucer shaders resulted in some amazing interactions between the aztec texture and the hull panel texture. I'll post my shame this evening but for now I've got the shader fixed and she's a beauty again!
Close-ups this evening. The lower pinstripe on the VIP deck is breaking up when I get too close. It's the same resolution as the upper (heck, it's the same damn image texture) but for some reason it gets absurdly pixelated when viewed from certain camera angles.
As promised, a close up view of the new lounge. I've kept the details reasonably rough since this isn't intended for close-up viewing.
And also, my double shame. To the left you will see the bizarre shading malfunction I was experiencing. I plugged the aztec image texture into the roughness of the reflection and it produced these dazzling fireflies. It's something I'll have to see if I can reproduce deliberately. It could definitely prove to be a happy accident for future projects.
You'll also observe that my scale for the original lounge was WAY off. As it was built originally, it could be mistaken for a kindergarten. Fortunately it didn't take much to trim out some furnishings and scale the rest up to adult proportions.
Good god, man! Disgusting. (ly great!) Will being keeping a close watch on this thread about them fireflies. Looking so good. And I know it's been there for a while, but that dome? Damn...
That's a weird error with the Aztecs. It almost looks like you've got some kind of line pattern textured to the specular slot.
Indeed! By plugging the aztec image texture into the roughness attribute, it appears to have knocked out the aztec pattern almost entirely. All that remained was the faintest outline. It will be interesting to see if I can find a way to deliberately abuse this effect
Oh, you have it plugged into roughness. That explains a lot. Yeah, you should be able to duplicate those results if you want them on something else by doing the same thing.
Would it be inappropriate for someone to ask you to share the node setup for that shader?
I'm quite flattered! I am planning to do some extensive brain dumps regarding the things that I've learned along the way once I button up the project. In their current form, my shaders are practically unsharable for the convoluted array of node configurations that I'm using. Part of my non-modeling time is being spent reviewing shader tutorials with a focus on organization and readability. I'll get a preview of the hull texture posted as soon as I can get the spaghetti straightened out to the point where someone could actually follow the madness of the methodology
Additionally, I've encountered a challenge of late. Now that the exterior textures are 'complete', I've painted myself into a memory corner with respect to rendering. I was horrified to realize yesterday when I attempted to do a render that my RAM utilization is now exceeding 8gb. Not being an expert at Blender I cannot say if this is entirely to be expected or if it is an abnormality due to design mistakes I have made. My gut tells me that I need to look at my shaders and see what I can do to optimize, hopefully dropping my memory footprint.
As was discussed earlier, it has been my plan to pick up a CUDA compatible video card that would provide better Blender performance. At 8gb for just the Enterprise, I've exceeded what GPU computing can do for rendering full scenes. The thought of having to render it in layers and composite it together in post (as was demonstrated last year in a tutorial by Andrew Price on BlenderGuru) is a bit dismaying for this project. While I would definitely still be able to work faster with a better video card (always having to stop and do a full render to see how a shader will work is a serious drag to performance), it is a sobering blow to realize that I may not be able to use it for full-scene rendering.
Memory consumption, generally speaking, is going to be a function of your textures rather than your shaders. Are you using a lot of 4K+ textures? 'cause that'll get you to chew threw memory real fast.
If that's not it and you feel comfortable doing so, I'd be happy to take a look at the file to see if I can suss anything out about what other causes could be at play. (I also have a CUDA GPU, so could give you a preview of render performance for when you get yours!)
Thank you for the offer, I may ultimately take you up on that but I want to take a stab at optimizing the project before I do.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I have a lot of image textures.
One of my tricks has been to use textures as a stencil. I define the shape of what I want with the alpha channel and I then plug a shader into that output. This allows a tremendous amount of flexibility but clearly comes with a price. As an example, the upper saucer lettering has two image textures, one to define the black lettering and the other to define the red pin-striping surrounding it.
While this has resulted in good visual results, it's definitely taken its toll in the memory footprint arena.
After reading your comment this morning I got to thinking about what I could do to shave things down. I want to whittle down my memory footprint while keeping the flexibility of my current design if possible.
The saucer as a whole represents a lot of my texture real estate. I did a lot of things sub-optimally as I was getting my UV mapping, node connecting feet wet. I need to scale down my images and adjust the UV maps to accommodate a smaller size image that properly conforms to the necessary shapes and not just overlay the entire surface as I had done originally.
Lastly, and this is where I think the real savings will come into play, I believe that I can get 3x the return on a single stencil texture if I encode three stencil layers into R, G, and B channels. I can then feed the stencil image into a "Separate RGB" node and feed each output into a mix shader as the factor. This will work perfectly on the upper saucer since I can have layers for the border surrounding the phasers, the black lettering, and lastly the red borders around the hatches as well as the pin-stripes.
I've mocked up a little test project to confirm that this last part will work. The memory footprint held steady so outputting the image into three different nodes didn't increase the utilization appreciably.
I'm pulling a late nighter at work so I won't get to do much tonight but the weekend will definitely afford me time to work on the project. I'll post results of my experiments, as well as a low-res stab at the rec-dec that I have nearly finished
Thank you for the offer, I may ultimately take you up on that but I want to take a stab at optimizing the project before I do.
Certainly; always more educational to figure your own way through!
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I have a lot of image textures.
Yeah, that'll do it in a hurry, especially if they're big!
The saucer as a whole represents a lot of my texture real estate. I did a lot of things sub-optimally as I was getting my UV mapping, node connecting feet wet. I need to scale down my images and adjust the UV maps to accommodate a smaller size image that properly conforms to the necessary shapes and not just overlay the entire surface as I had done originally.
If you haven't already, I highly, highly recommend checking out tobiasrichter's texturing tutorial. With a radial saucer like that of the Constitution, you should be able to get away with just texturing a single "wedge" and then repeating it. That'll definitely save on memory consumption!
Lastly, and this is where I think the real savings will come into play, I believe that I can get 3x the return on a single stencil texture if I encode three stencil layers into R, G, and B channels. I can then feed the stencil image into a "Separate RGB" node and feed each output into a mix shader as the factor. This will work perfectly on the upper saucer since I can have layers for the border surrounding the phasers, the black lettering, and lastly the red borders around the hatches as well as the pin-stripes.
Yep! Very good idea and one I've used here and there as well. If you have black/white glow maps and such, you can also stuff these into an alpha channel and then just use the alpha data as a value input rather than transparency.
Posts
That's why ROG laptops are designed like this (scroll down a bit). My ROG actually stays cooler than my desktop, which is air-cooled out the whazoo. It's a pretty incredible feat of engineering.
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Nice. I hadn't seen one of those before. Usually, stuff that's designed for gaming is good for CGI as well.
Funny you should mention the ASUS ROG series. I'm using an older model right now. Unfortunately it was the 'Best Buy edition' so it has the worst monitor known to man. It's rocking a Core i7 though so I've been able to brute force my way through this project. My desktop has a 600-series nVidia which works about the same as the 560M from my Asus.
I'm looking at a 900-series gpu for my upgrade. As far as I can tell, just about anything 700-series or up will be a welcome improvement
However, your model is coming along very very very nicely.
Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC 12GB
1TB NVMe SSD, 2 x 1GB SATA SSD, 4TB external HDD
32 GB RAM
Windows 11 Pro
I believe that Blender does take advantage of the GPU when rendering (I think I read that when I was looking at Blender).
And very nice laptop McC.
I was messing around with Blender a few weeks ago, which is the only reason I even know this.
I've got an ROG G74SX that I love even though it is rather large.
Exterior modeling and shading are pretty close to done. Now to deal with the windows, VIP lounge, shuttle bay, and the arboretum.
I've got some bizarre artifact issue occurring around the rim on the port and starboard extreme. It only shows up during renders so it's proving a bit challenging to squash. I will whip this into shape tomorrow morning.
I'm still overjoyed at how authentic the shader feels when the oblique lighting throws up the hints of the colors underneath. You can see a hint of it playing off the starboard warp nacelle in this shot.
Just a short way to go now, relative to how long I've been working on this project. Soon I will get to play with animating this beauty. I cannot wait!
I am quite flattered, thank you! The shaders for the hull have been one of my greatest challenges in Blender. I don't think I have a full grasp of Cycles nodes yet so what I've achieved to date has been brute force and endless tweaking. It is my hope that with practice I can simplify them considerably without sacrificing the polish of the results.
I'll have some test shots posted this evening but for now I have only one image of the new lounge. Canon reference material for this is very limited. I've decided to skip the 70's decor from the concept sketches and opted for more of a "Wrath of Kahn" aesthetic.
I also discovered the source of the artifacts I was seeing on the lower saucer. Apparently one of my tweaks to the saucer shaders resulted in some amazing interactions between the aztec texture and the hull panel texture. I'll post my shame this evening but for now I've got the shader fixed and she's a beauty again!
Close-ups this evening. The lower pinstripe on the VIP deck is breaking up when I get too close. It's the same resolution as the upper (heck, it's the same damn image texture) but for some reason it gets absurdly pixelated when viewed from certain camera angles.
Don't forget about the light on the outboard nacelle grilles.
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/tuchd/ch13/tuchd2535.jpg
Absolutely! I've got the structure in place and I'm planning on lighting them up once I finish the windows and shuttle bay.
And also, my double shame. To the left you will see the bizarre shading malfunction I was experiencing. I plugged the aztec image texture into the roughness of the reflection and it produced these dazzling fireflies. It's something I'll have to see if I can reproduce deliberately. It could definitely prove to be a happy accident for future projects.
You'll also observe that my scale for the original lounge was WAY off. As it was built originally, it could be mistaken for a kindergarten. Fortunately it didn't take much to trim out some furnishings and scale the rest up to adult proportions.
That's a weird error with the Aztecs. It almost looks like you've got some kind of line pattern textured to the specular slot.
Indeed! By plugging the aztec image texture into the roughness attribute, it appears to have knocked out the aztec pattern almost entirely. All that remained was the faintest outline. It will be interesting to see if I can find a way to deliberately abuse this effect
Would it be inappropriate for someone to ask you to share the node setup for that shader?
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
I'm quite flattered! I am planning to do some extensive brain dumps regarding the things that I've learned along the way once I button up the project. In their current form, my shaders are practically unsharable for the convoluted array of node configurations that I'm using. Part of my non-modeling time is being spent reviewing shader tutorials with a focus on organization and readability. I'll get a preview of the hull texture posted as soon as I can get the spaghetti straightened out to the point where someone could actually follow the madness of the methodology
Additionally, I've encountered a challenge of late. Now that the exterior textures are 'complete', I've painted myself into a memory corner with respect to rendering. I was horrified to realize yesterday when I attempted to do a render that my RAM utilization is now exceeding 8gb. Not being an expert at Blender I cannot say if this is entirely to be expected or if it is an abnormality due to design mistakes I have made. My gut tells me that I need to look at my shaders and see what I can do to optimize, hopefully dropping my memory footprint.
As was discussed earlier, it has been my plan to pick up a CUDA compatible video card that would provide better Blender performance. At 8gb for just the Enterprise, I've exceeded what GPU computing can do for rendering full scenes. The thought of having to render it in layers and composite it together in post (as was demonstrated last year in a tutorial by Andrew Price on BlenderGuru) is a bit dismaying for this project. While I would definitely still be able to work faster with a better video card (always having to stop and do a full render to see how a shader will work is a serious drag to performance), it is a sobering blow to realize that I may not be able to use it for full-scene rendering.
If that's not it and you feel comfortable doing so, I'd be happy to take a look at the file to see if I can suss anything out about what other causes could be at play. (I also have a CUDA GPU, so could give you a preview of render performance for when you get yours!)
8GB does seem awfully high...
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog
Thank you for the offer, I may ultimately take you up on that but I want to take a stab at optimizing the project before I do.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I have a lot of image textures.
One of my tricks has been to use textures as a stencil. I define the shape of what I want with the alpha channel and I then plug a shader into that output. This allows a tremendous amount of flexibility but clearly comes with a price. As an example, the upper saucer lettering has two image textures, one to define the black lettering and the other to define the red pin-striping surrounding it.
While this has resulted in good visual results, it's definitely taken its toll in the memory footprint arena.
After reading your comment this morning I got to thinking about what I could do to shave things down. I want to whittle down my memory footprint while keeping the flexibility of my current design if possible.
The saucer as a whole represents a lot of my texture real estate. I did a lot of things sub-optimally as I was getting my UV mapping, node connecting feet wet. I need to scale down my images and adjust the UV maps to accommodate a smaller size image that properly conforms to the necessary shapes and not just overlay the entire surface as I had done originally.
Lastly, and this is where I think the real savings will come into play, I believe that I can get 3x the return on a single stencil texture if I encode three stencil layers into R, G, and B channels. I can then feed the stencil image into a "Separate RGB" node and feed each output into a mix shader as the factor. This will work perfectly on the upper saucer since I can have layers for the border surrounding the phasers, the black lettering, and lastly the red borders around the hatches as well as the pin-stripes.
I've mocked up a little test project to confirm that this last part will work. The memory footprint held steady so outputting the image into three different nodes didn't increase the utilization appreciably.
RGB Stencil Shader.PNG
I'm pulling a late nighter at work so I won't get to do much tonight but the weekend will definitely afford me time to work on the project. I'll post results of my experiments, as well as a low-res stab at the rec-dec that I have nearly finished
:rolleyes:
Certainly; always more educational to figure your own way through!
Yeah, that'll do it in a hurry, especially if they're big!
If you haven't already, I highly, highly recommend checking out tobiasrichter's texturing tutorial. With a radial saucer like that of the Constitution, you should be able to get away with just texturing a single "wedge" and then repeating it. That'll definitely save on memory consumption!
Yep! Very good idea and one I've used here and there as well. If you have black/white glow maps and such, you can also stuff these into an alpha channel and then just use the alpha data as a value input rather than transparency.
Sounds like you're on the right track!
Books: [ Ashes of Alour-Tan | Embers of Alour-Tan ] | Blender Tutorials | Blog