Hello!

I wanted to test how practical it would be to make Indie Animated Movies within houdini and mantra, using laptops connected to gridmarkets cloud or Hqueue with minimal additional pipeline. It was pretty straightforward! Here is my first dip into this approach, quick trailer for 30 min short based around the judge dredd vs judge death comic book and video games series. About halfway finished ATM.
Cheers!



http://www.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=sje76YjhQMk [youtube.com]

Nice work, so what was the price to render all that if you don't mind me asking? (ballpark figure is ok)
How quick was the turn around?
Do you have to pay more for a quicker turn around?

The animation is a little rough but I thought the rendering looked ok.

I did not notice any noise in the renders which is typical of Mantra.
What were your sample settings on the Mantra node you submitted to the cloud?

Keep up the good work! (I loved that original Judge Dredd movie)

Hi!

Cheers for the feedback. Yup, the character anim is a bit stoccato and linear and also need some tweaking on dynamics things. Plan has been to block out the entire story then run an iterative process of redo and replace things in priority list till time and money runs out! (Which is nearly zero budget and hobby time on this occasion). There is a second part of this though that is longer length and will have budget so will be taking on a few character animators for that.

Price wise is really variable. Some is hqueue, some gridmarket. Obviously hqueue is free (HUGE bonus if you are rendering anim work) but slowish in my case as only using a few crappy old computers. I use the cloud for heavier stuff, prices below. Still, super easy to setup a home render pipeline with hqeue.

Gridmarkets really is Rolls-Royce. Love it. I've setup maya/houdini/Arnold pipes with Amazon before at firms and that is great but IMHO, for mantra gridmarkets is excellent. Can be pricey according to what you do. I have several scenes of heavy dynamics pyro, crowds, destruction that came out around $100 a pop for around 100 frames but includes pre-render of simulation sim or geometry. One big scene 250 frames with presim came out at $200-ish. But very handy instead of trying to upload or sim locally 100's GB of data.

That is the worst case. Straightforward characters or packed environments maybe $5-$10 per 100 frames sometimes. Very quick turnaround and the data heavy stuff blazes on machines I could never afford to personally buy.

I like mantra. Noise on PBR can be a big issue but I find the main/max rays, noise level and reflection/color limits always tweak out the buzzing rather than cranking the samples level (except fur/hair, will go up around 6-7 samples for that). I use one or two custom metal, glass and volume shaders that also handle noise but not often, much of it is standard palette materials. You can get them all non buzzy eventually without killing render times with high sampling.

Cheers!