Hey @Brenda,
That is gracious of you. For my part, I usually tend to be quite minimalist in my posts - well, in speech generally. Maybe more words would have made my meaning clearer. Sorry I’m a lexical skinflint!
Regards
Jeremy
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In the render, I kept it a bit off axis.
The center fresnel lenses came out okay, but…
I don’t have good drawings for this ( first order 8-sided flasher ), so I tried to convert a omnidirectional one. It’s not perfect. The catadioptric elements both reflect and reflect, so it’s not a trivial matter to get it right–and the lenses are laid back–and they have a radius on them. Even if I get it right, I might be further diverging from the original design. Now that I know how to make them, I might give it one more go. The upper prisms are lofted from 3 triangles, and then capped into a solid.
This little project has been one of the most fun of all the projects I have done.
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bling bling? 
@Brenda once you are done with the light house, since you are making this a work in progress, could you maybe post the lighthouse geometry if its not commercial? i am sure also @nathanletwory would love it as a test model to plunge into his density texture (once done), but i might also try some volumetric renderings when i get to it, which i could post. dont feel obliged of course.
Encephalon, I am sorry, but I likely won’t post the whole project online. The Rhino people are a different case.
I found better blueprints, though, they still are not accurate enough for the catadioptric prisms on the top and bottom. You can see from the dead-on shot that some of the rings are dark.
Though, the brasses look better, and there’s more of them. There needs to be a different wireframe for the corner than there is for the middle.
Oh, my poor AMD 3900x. I couldn’t afford the money extra for the 3950x, or even the 3900x, really. Still this the first Cycles multi-window preview, I have done. Even the Noctua fans and cooler I have in my rig gets going pretty loud for this stuff.
It’s like an old piece of jewelry, that weighed 6 tons and stood over 12 foot high.
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I am rendering a 600-frame fly-through from the upper deck, up the only flight of stair I will have in it, and around the upper area around the light, taking a look into it as we pass.
It will post it when it’s done, which won’t be today. It’s being rendered on Cycles with only a few hundred passes, 400, if memory serves me, which it may not because I am way tired. It does a 1920x1080 frame in about 3.5 minutes.
[ My efforts to make by 3900x quiet enough not to be obtrusive while I sleep…have failed. The case is lined with indoor-outdoor carpet. I have Nuctua fans and a cooler in it. Perhaps the case fans can come down a bit in speed. The CPU lingers at 78-80c, so I am not going to lower the CPU fan. The chipset fan usually isn’t reving too fast.
I am getting a little nervous about my decision not to get the 3950x, but I still need a good monitor, and well, I have housing issues. There are no houses for sale around here for less than 1 million Dollars, any more, and renting anything is not cheap. House-flipping is a crime.]
As recommended by Nathan, I might try nVidia’s denoise on a copy of the frames in a post-process before saving off the video. I tried Denoise on a few images; it seems to work.
After five hours I cancelled the render process because I had not considered that i just threw point light inside the upper deck, which has no penumbra because it has no width, and therefor looked bad. The shadows were the kind razor sharp that only a point light could offer, or perhaps in the real world, some plasma from a TIG torch might give nearly as harsh a lighting situation.
I deleted the interior light as well as the omnidirectional array rectangle lights I used for the main beacon, and replaced them both with simple spheres. The interior looks much better. The main light looks okay.
I am cautiously optimistic that the renders, at least the first ones, are taking a 1/2 minute less time than the other ones.
Question 1:
Are these nurbs or meshes in your nodel?
Question 2:
What is your pc spec?
Hi, I am using NURBs, I don’t like diversions from the creative process or in this case, re-creative process because it really multiplies effort. One of the hardest things is moving from one program to another constantly in an export-import cycles, or managing dead-end files, or layers that have to be deleted later.
Reverse engineering can (also) be a strain too going from the real-world to this little computer euclidean Lite-Brite place we’ve carved out for ourselves, with Rhino’s help.
One might say that I can just extract some meshes, but as soon as this render is done, I am going to build the light-keepers house building, and perhaps copy these stairs down only one more floor, and make the simplest hilltop possible.
My machine is a 12-Core AMD 3900x with 32GB of RAM. The machine has a GTX 1080, but for for any project other than small I render on CPU because Cycles is more stable and interactive that way. On my machine, the CPU is just a bit faster than my GPU. For these purposes I should have bought the 3950x instead, but I am presently doing the down-and-out in Silicon Valley thing. I might try to find some part-time work, if I can get some.
It will take longer than I thought to render the 600 images. It’s on 128 of 600, but I restarted it about 18 hours ago. As long as it finishes, I am okay.
At only 400 passes, this is a sample frame of the stairs going up. I am cautiously optimistic that nVidia’s denoiser can clean this light noise up.
The warm lighthouse halogen-tungsten color made the green appear more saturated than I thought. The supports that hold the stairs together aren’t flat, but lofted sections. It took me a while to make one of these stairs because of the overlap. And, I forgot to copy some little parts, but at 30-60 frames per second, they are going to go by pretty quick.
Perhaps I should have added the brick material with the bumpmap here, too. Sigh. Perhaps for the next one. The little hexagon holes in the platform are just visible, and their shadows.
It isn’t readily apparent, but there are no stairs leading up to this flight of stairs 
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That’s fine too, it got renovated
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I should have done the renders on the Rhino 7 WIP. it’s supposed to be faster.
I will likely run off another of these animations after I put one more flight of stairs, which is visible, and I also found some new drawings of the decks.
The rendering continues, perhaps I should have done fewer passes than 400. I compounded my error by making it 60fps, though there is a tight turn, and I “thought” that turning it would be too coarse at 30fps.
After 2 days of rendering, I am cautiously optimistic about the AMD 3900x stability. Cycles is running pretty good, too.
I am going to do another animation after I add the other F’n platform, which is indeed visible in the video. Another animation of the light rotating from the outside would be neat, which won’t have many frames, because the light only has to go 1/8th the way around.
Mistakes were made:
1.) I missed with my animation setup. In order to see the light, the animation would have to be square with a Fresnel panel, and I missed. I was level, but there was a radial misalignment because of the curve discretization/segmentation of the camera rail curves not lining up.
2.) The viewer will plainly see that they would have to magically appear at the top of the lighthouse because there are no establishing stairs, upwards.
3.) The lower inside of the lighthouse looks dull and uninteresting, with nary a brick material to give it interest.
4.) Stairs still need work.
5.) Using passive voice to obfuscate responsibility.
I will post the video tomorrow, anyway. It was just supposed to be a fun thing anyway.
After invoking the Denoiser batch, I get to see something this go by 600 times. It does back up the frames by using a separate output file, so perhaps I didn’t need to use a copy. It takes longer to read-and-write the files than the de-noising process. if one has a lot of files to be denoised, then an NVMe SSD would be handy, with it’s 10x speed.
My filenames were not zero-padded correctly, which is my fault. I renamed them with Irfanview, which did well to reorder out of ASCII order filenames.
C:\Denoiser>C:\Denoiser\Program\Denoiser.exe -i "Frame__316.png" -o "denoised_Frame__316.png"
Launching Nvidia AI Denoiser command line app v2.3
Created by Declan Russell (25/12/2017 ~ Merry Christmas!)
Input image: Frame__316.png
Loaded successfully
Output image: denoised_Frame__316.png
Denoising...
Denoising complete in 0.292 seconds
Saving to: denoised_Frame__316.png
Done!@nathanletwory added a (hidden) denoiser function to the cycles stand alone renderer (also hidden) that denoises the result directly so you don’t have to do that in post… if it works with animations I don’t know though…
Run _TestPackageManager and install DenoiseRaytraced:
Then run _DenoiseRaytraceCheck and follow the installation instructions.
(Basically just Download the denoiser file which is a zip and unzip the content (the Denoiserv2.2 folder) into the folder that Rhino opens up for you.
Rerun the check to verify that Rhino finds the denoiser.
Then just run the DenoiceRaytraced app as a command, type in width and height and number of passes and choose destination. Once rendered it starts the denoising and the result is two files.
Did a quick test here:
15 PASSES: Rendertime 8 seconds:
75 PASSES: 28 sec:
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I do remember the option, but at some point, I wanted to experiment with the Denoiser alone for other things. Thanks for reminding me, though because it will come in handy.
~
Cycles and Denoiser did their job well, it’s just effort, that needs so much work.
For the time being, it’s on dropbox, because youtube’s encoding really hit this, and they don’t serve hi-res for the first few seconds, though Firefox has an keyframe issue…
…Which crappy youtube’s reencoded video doesn’t:
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Kind of reminds me of the first Myst game, that my older cousin used to play, when we were small children. Nice, job!
What do you use for the walkthrough animation?
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I think I could have gotten it right with Bongo, which is much better than what I used.
Instead, to approximate the functionality of the 2-rail camera included with Rhino v6, which doesn’t work with Cycles, I used this Grasshopper and this:
It has a setup that will do single-rail and point animation, I changed it to a 2-rail camera follower by:
- Deleted the referenced point
- Added component to reference my other camera curve
- Divided the curve with points
- Added a list-item
- Pulled a wire from the sketch’s frame counter to the index number input
If I would have drew lines between the points, I might have seen that they never lined up perpendicular to the camera. Oh well.
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Oh I see! How are the frames rendered? With an animated slider?
This should look even better if some day in the future I add support for camera motion blur.
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The frames are rendered from the Grasshopper components. There are 2 long curve; one for the camera, one for the lookat/target.
I am replacing the platforms, with cast-iron segmented ones ( like the green one), approximating the originals.