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If you wish to support me, here's my Patreon link:
https://www.patreon.com/djthed

Paypal Alternative:
https://goo.gl/YTgduc

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Finally getting back into the swing of things. It's been an incredibly long time since the last time I showed progress on this set. You can find the previous version here for comparison:
https://www.deviantart.com/therealdjthed/art/4K-The-Mane-Attraction-WIP-8-Set-683193271

So, one of the main overall differences is instead of trying to copy the original shot to a tea, I'm now instead trying to interpret the original assets from the show into 3D in my own way that I think works best, while still holding true to the original in terms of the overall composition. Changes like this include the more detailed dynamic ground texture, the shining stars in the background, the smoke from a fog machine on the set (and yes, it'll be animated simulated smoke in the final animation), and the more realistic take on the clouds. On top of that, there's some more general improvements, like the stage lights feeling less fake than before, better color correction, and the depth of field being drastically lowered in intensity just due to how unreasonably intense it was before.


Unfortunately, rendering this set is still not cheap. At just 1080p, this rendered image took 73 minutes of straight rendering to complete. Just this one frame.

The main layer with the entire stage and the ground beneath it took 32 minutes to render (with 3072 samples).

The layer with the smoke from the fog machine took 18 minutes to render (with 8192 samples).

And the background layer took 23 minutes to render (with 768 samples). I still aim to optimize the background layer a bit more, but I'm still aiming to get about that render time, just with more samples.


So to put this in perspective, the animation will be rendered at 24 frames per second, and will last to 3-4 minutes. That's about 4000-5000 frames. IF each frame took 73 minutes to render (which it won't, it'll vary), it'll take 29 hours to render just ONE SECOND during the final render of the animation. For a full 4 minutes of this, it'll take more than 200 DAYS of straight, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, worth of rendering on my main PC that has TWO Nvidia GTX 1070s carrying that load. And as you would expect, that's an incredibly unreasonable ask to have me put my main PC that I use every day into slavery and render away for well over half a year.

This is why I want to stress that I really, really want to save up money to get more GPUs to put in other systems to sort of create my own local render farm. My goal right now is to get 6 more GTX 1070s, which will quadruple the rendering power I currently have, turning that 200 day render into a 50 day render, which is incredibly significant. And thankfully, the prices for the Nvidia GTX 10 series has gone down quite significantly as of late, so this isn't something that's out of the question. I could even get GTX 1080s if the money is right.

But again, unfortunately, money has been more tight lately because real life is a thing that exists. I can't thank my current Patrons enough for the help they've given me, because if I didn't have them now, I wouldn't be able to be barely scraping by as is. But my current life situation isn't allowing me to really save a whole lot of money per month.

I always feel weird asking this so directly, but if this project is going to happen, I'm going to need more help. I don't want to ask others who are not in a good position to help someone financially, but for those who are able to, please consider helping me out. You can pledge to my Patreon page, and if you pledge $5 or more, you can join my Discord server where I share a lot of things that are behind the scenes as well as showing things early in that server, and it's also one of the very first places I go to seek early feedback on my unreleased work as well:
https://www.patreon.com/djthed

If Patreon isn't your thing, you can also directly donate to me through Paypal:
Donation Link:
https://goo.gl/YTgduc
Or you could do a direct money transfer to this email on Paypal to avoid donation fees:
[email protected]

Seriously, any amount of money will help me out so much.

I have lots of spare parts for PC builds, so all I really need is the GPUs. They are the most important part that I still need. I also luckily know a few people that are kind enough to help out with rendering with their own PCs, but it's not going to be enough to reduce the render times enough to make it more reasonable on its own, and unfortunately online render farms like Sheep-It won't work due to the use of scripts and file size limitations they have. So again, any help that I can get is massive. The only things I need are 6 GPUs, which the GTX 1070 can go as low as $300 a piece instead of the $450 they were just a few months ago, then I'll be a lot more satisfied with the rendering capabilities that I have on my own. Otherwise, I don't know how I'm going to do this in a reasonable amount of time. I don't need all the money at once, I just need to earn enough each month to be able to save up to the amount I need.

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And, really, seriously, Special thanks to my Patrons:
BLANK3T
Bastler
StabeCoder
JetWave
StylinGreymon
Scope
MCtoastie
Flopzee
CyberPon3
Katharine Berry

Upvotes at import: 56 | Stars at import: 33
Posted previously at: 2018-10-09T23:31:58 | Posted previously by: DJTHED