Sintel 4k rendering
on December 7th, 2010, by Ton
Since mid October we’re keeping our office warm with rendering 4k frames. Pablo and Dolf have been cleaning some errors and preparing all files for this breathtaking resolution. Some of you might have seen the sneak preview of shots at the Blender Conference, at a gigantic 4k screen!
All of the shots have been rendered now, but we suffer the obvious hair problems and occasional crashes still. Hopefully it’ll be done in a few days: this friday Pablo flies back to sunny and warm Patagonia!
Here you can download 5 random nice images from the farm:
http://download.blender.org/durian/4K_examples.zip
Pablo also collected a list of issues with current .blend files (as on the DVDs) and made a log for how-to rerender the film. Will be posted end of the week as well.
An official premiere for the 4k film has to be finalized still… but soon after all material will become available freely, as usual.
-Ton-
December 7th, 2010 at 11:36 am
Notes (more in the next blogpost about 4k)
Blender clearly demonstrated that is not ideal for 4K yet, but! rendering Sintel was a big proof of concept that *is* possible, painful but feasible, along the way some bugs were fixed as well to make this possible, since some of the nodes don’t scale well at high resolutions.
The renderer did great, really, the render times didn’t grow a lot from 2k to 4k, that surprised me, the bottleneck was the compositor, but I’m eager to see real development work in this area for Mango (tiled compositing? 😀 )
Another fact, is that we ***need*** OpenCL! don’t know what kind of funding the developer is needing, but if no company picks up this would be a great funding project (like for savetheoceansim.com).
December 7th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
hey, I was wondering if any dvds where still available. I have forgotten to by mine!
December 7th, 2010 at 12:14 pm
@JaydenB: yep! definitely, as well as tees and posters! 😀 (I’m stealing some when going home this weekend, they’re epic!)
December 7th, 2010 at 1:21 pm
Sounds like it’s going pretty well.
Hope the premiere’s going to be awesome, too. 🙂
December 7th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
the 4k stills look really nice. Can see how rendering at this resolution is adding a lot of work… one would never even be able to see that a front tooth is floating in 03.2a_comp_000018.jpg at lower resolutions 🙂
December 7th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Thanks for the cool pics! And thanks for paving the way with all of your technical trials and tribulations. It will make Blender that much better, and our work much better as well.
Cheers
December 7th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
I do need something that makes rendering large amount of polygons, at good resolutions (like the astounding 720p) and animation orientated possible in a average PC and if paying would get it done in let’s say, very fast time (as in a formula 1 racing driver perception of time and not the one of a planetary physicist), I sure wouldn’t mind to contribute.
From my current point of view one minute less per frame is money saved and not spent, so it would be cool to make it happen 🙂
December 7th, 2010 at 3:40 pm
…I see now you were referring to the Open CL project for accelerating the compositor nodes, I was surfing on a different wave, sorry! 🙂 But anyway, my last line remains valid.
December 7th, 2010 at 8:11 pm
Ah, sample 4k frames, Christmas did come early this year. 🙂
December 7th, 2010 at 9:21 pm
quote paplo:”Another fact, is that we ***need*** OpenCL! don’t know what kind of funding the developer is needing, but if no company picks up this would be a great funding project (like for savetheoceansim.com).”
yes indeed. gpu acellerated node editor got to be pushed!
tell me where and i would donate for this feature.
dave
December 7th, 2010 at 11:05 pm
@Pablo:
We /ALL/ need openCL!
A look on the forums will tell you how much ppl expected a rewrite of the renderer in OpenCL (afaik, you can’t feed open CL with the same functions you’d use in C. Those won’t take advantage of the parallelised architecture).
From what I understand, it would be like redoing everything that has been done in the older revisions of blender from scratch, including the hair, the particle system, the cloth sim, the fluids, refraction, ambiant occlusion, Reflexion, and all those things we all take for granted since blender 2.4!
So… maybe for blender 2.65
December 8th, 2010 at 2:29 am
OpenCL is fine just as long as you don`t expect to let the same image rendered twice look the same. The same for compositing. OpenCL is fine for previewrendering an editing but you have to do the final stuff on CPU as usual. Could be a clutch with accuracy since CPUs work with double accuracy and GPUs don`t. Anyway GPU-acceleration would make editing an tweaking alot faster but the final stuff has to be rendered on CPU because GPU gets to unpredictable.
December 8th, 2010 at 2:37 am
Hi, i Finally got myself the DVD and looking at the production files i used the Sintel file, only to have an infinite amount of problems
(some bones dont move, can edit the model etc etc)
now, im sure the file is in perfect condition, is just that there are many hidden things i have to enable/disable to do basic stuff, like for instance enbaling the face controls in the menu pressing “n”
or what does it mean when an option is purple?
sooo…….
i was wondering, if some one of you guys could help us all by doing a tutorial, on whats going on in the sintel file!
im not a beginer in blender, ive been using it since 2006, but theres is just so many things in there!, i still cant even figure out how to use the fingers bones! D:
so, if theres anyone reading, HELP PLEASE! :c
December 8th, 2010 at 6:14 am
“Here you can download 5 random nice images from the farm:”
There are only 4! :'(
Any way good to hear the news. I can’t wait to see the whole movie in 4k, but I think that will be a long ways off for me. (No 4k screens around here that I can use.)
It is sad to know that all production of this movie will soon be over. But who knows? There may be a Sintel 2 at some point in the future. 😉
December 8th, 2010 at 6:56 am
No, there won’t be a Sintel 2 movie. The next open movie will be about evil flesh-eating cows.
December 8th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
Impressive, very lifelike.
December 8th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Pablo, does this mean you have made animation/compositing changes ?
Or fixed those random artifacts in the film.
Or is it the same but just in 4k.
Thanks,
Radiant
December 8th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
@angbor
That’s just silly now 😉 Gelato did it just fine even in pre-g80 times.
December 8th, 2010 at 10:34 pm
Right now, 4k renders are kinda spoiled by the low resolution of some textures, like Sintel’s iris (1st sample) and the area arround the mouth for scales (2nd sample)
December 9th, 2010 at 1:31 am
At 640×480 or at 4K, I can barely see Sintel’s eyebrows. I guess it’s better than her having a unibrow.
December 9th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
BTW, when I said “we” need OpenCL, I meant the Blender Community!, not us Durian team, we’re using the Render branch which is already a bit outdated comparing to trunk (I can’t even report bugs anymore! most of them are fixed on 2.55 or trunk 😛 )
Blogpost coming either tonight or tomorrow (I’m flying home tomorrow evening!).
December 10th, 2010 at 7:13 am
In the picture labeled 08.2c_comp_000113.jpg sintel’s thumb seems to be gone lol. at first glance i couldn’t tell if that was her left or right hand and it looked very strange 🙁 otherwise everything is stunning!!!!
December 20th, 2010 at 1:29 pm
@Tate:
Of course her left thumb is hidden, not totally gone 😛
Wow, should we be this picky? Amazing pictures by the way. 😀