...I pay under $70 a month for internet and basic 70ish channel cable from Wide Open West (formerly SBC), which I find quite reasonable, and it's not a "special 3 month deal" like comcast. Though, at my previous residence, also in Oakland County, I paid about $90 for the same service (except it was not capped to 512Kb, but it never got that fast anyway, and they had lots of problem from restructuring). Cursed Bright House Networks (formerly time warner).
I have no need for silly government wireless, though I imagine wide area wireless is going to become quite common in the next few years, and the government and the telecoms are probably going to be quite interested in getting as many dirty little fingers in that pot (despite what I'm sure is good intentions of lots of people who want to bring about such programs).
Further elaboration on the impossibleness of this
on
Rendering Shrek@Home?
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· Score: 5, Informative
I believe I saw someone earlier mention how there can be terabytes of data go into a single frame of CGI film, and these days that can be pretty correct.
A.rib file or similar type file for PDI's renderer will probably contain a few million polygons and/or a few hundred thousand control verticies for implicit surfaces such as nurbs and sub-Ds, which can be a lot of data (my scene files at work average 4-5 million polygons and are about 150 megs on average, saved in a binary file format). And, that doesn't include particles, procedurals, all the motion data so that proper motion blur can be calculated...
And then the textures... They do use lots of procedurals, but they also use lots of 16 bit per channel textures of 4000x4000 for face textures, or even higher. Some people are using tiles if 16 bit tiffs for displacement maps now that equate to like a 100,000x100,000 image for displacement maps, because the accuracy requirements for close up renders are so bloody high. That can be many many gigs of data there.
And, if you're raytracing like in Shrek 2, then you need to have as much of that data in RAM at once, or else render time spirals out of sensibility, unlike scanline renderman where swapping is easier, because the rays bouncing throughout the scene make scene divisions more difficult (but still possible). I work with 4 gigs of RAM and we can just barely render 6 million polygons + a few 4k displacement maps all raytraced at once (in windows unfortunately). And, when we render sequences and stuff, we often almost kill our network because distributing all this data to just 20-30 rendernodes is pretty tough (and how would that scale to a big renderfarm with thousands of rendernodes...)
So, yeah, like everyone else is saying, bandwidth limitations and that people running the screen saver probably don't have the hardware and OS to really run 4+ gigs of RAM, this Shrek@home idea seems rather unlikely. It would be cool though, if it worked...
I could be wrong, since this information comes from auto companies, but supposedly cars are the most recycled products out there. Most of the metals and perhaps even plastics and glass are usually recycled from totalled cars and stuff, again, supposedly. Seems reasonable to me...
Renderman has been shown working on OSX since last summer. At the last siggraph I talked to some pixar render techs at their booth, where they were rendering frames of Finding Nemo right in front of us on a G5. While the G5 was faster than current Pentiums, the Pixars guys said that the price performance champ was still a 2.8 xeon, and I doubt at market prices that's changed. They did have a lot more work to do on it then, and probably still now. I seem to remember them saying they were waiting for better support of more than 3 gigs of RAM at once in Panther...
Anyway, what's really interesting about this move by Pixar will be to see if MTOR and Slim and all those tools come out for Mac soon. In otherwords, Renderman that's actually useful for those of us without our own custom pipeline already in place...
It'll be fun to see how many polygons I can fit into a raytrace accelleration tree on our G5 at work with 4 gigs of RAM. I'll see how it compares to me rendering 6 million polygons with a few hundred megs of textures in Vray on a PC with *barf* windows (maximum process memory usage 2.3 gigs on a two thread setup before it crashes).
Fiberglass is not so great. The Corvette is, and always has been at least partially made from fiberglass, allowing a rigid body and reasonable weight despite a 5.7L iron block engine (I am not 100% sure of the iron part, just to be fair). It REALLY sucks in crashes though, I think I heard about there being NHSTA investigations. Someone told me that Hummers have fiberglass in their chassis also.
Carbon Fiber is great, but like someone said, it's lack of deformability makes it difficult to engineer for collision protection. It's current price is about $12 a pound, though there are companies (BMW for instance) looking into getting costs down for mass production. The price for steel is like $.50 a pound or something like that, I forget exactly. Carbon Fiber is GREAT for the roll cage, suspension parts, and lots of other little things like driveshafts.
Aluminum is sorta the wave of the near future. It has pretty decent crumple characteristics and is light and reasonably strong and low on corrosion. "Space Age" Bond and rivet technology specifically is the wave of the future for aluminum bodies. This can be found in the new Jaguar XJ (bigger than it's predicessor, but 440 pounds lighter, and stiffer ans safer), Most new Aston Martins (Brits again), and the Lotus Elise (Brits yet again, and this will be available in america in 2004!). Aluminum is also good for most car parts from engines to suspension, as long as it doesn't need to be super strong like transmission parts and some stuff like that. The Ford 427 (7.0L swept displacement) concept engine is all aluminum and weighs less than a Ford 5.4L V8 that has far less horsepower (590 vs. about 400 {in the mustang cobra R) Another good thing about Bond and Rivet is that it will trasition well to carbon fiber and other materials when they become affordable.
Steel sucks, and automakers are looking to get rid of as much of it as they can. Though I must say, Volvo's use of Boron Steel for the XC90 roll cage is a good move.
Nothing will ever make a car last forever though. I think it'll be good for cars in the future to be more modular, so that you can ad new technology instead of buying a whole new car, without having to endure an expensive costumization progress. It's be nice to the left over parts to be recyclable, and to a large extent, they already are, as someone pointed out, cars are the most recycles products out there.
Hydrogen combustion engines seem like a great idea too. Hydrogen can combust a much leaner mixture than gas, making the engine more flexible (for instance, in a hybrid, a hydrogen engine might not have to be shut down and restarted since it can idle at an extremely lean rate). And you can just use the same fuel in a fuel cell and power all the accessories electrically instead of having a big heavy complicated accessory drive train, saving weight (maybe) and increasing engine smoothness. Other than being too boxy and having a silly interior I like this concept. I wonder if it actually works.
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...I pay under $70 a month for internet and basic 70ish channel cable from Wide Open West (formerly SBC), which I find quite reasonable, and it's not a "special 3 month deal" like comcast.
Though, at my previous residence, also in Oakland County, I paid about $90 for the same service (except it was not capped to 512Kb, but it never got that fast anyway, and they had lots of problem from restructuring). Cursed Bright House Networks (formerly time warner).
I have no need for silly government wireless, though I imagine wide area wireless is going to become quite common in the next few years, and the government and the telecoms are probably going to be quite interested in getting as many dirty little fingers in that pot (despite what I'm sure is good intentions of lots of people who want to bring about such programs).
I believe I saw someone earlier mention how there can be terabytes of data go into a single frame of CGI film, and these days that can be pretty correct.
.rib file or similar type file for PDI's renderer will probably contain a few million polygons and/or a few hundred thousand control verticies for implicit surfaces such as nurbs and sub-Ds, which can be a lot of data (my scene files at work average 4-5 million polygons and are about 150 megs on average, saved in a binary file format). And, that doesn't include particles, procedurals, all the motion data so that proper motion blur can be calculated...
A
And then the textures... They do use lots of procedurals, but they also use lots of 16 bit per channel textures of 4000x4000 for face textures, or even higher. Some people are using tiles if 16 bit tiffs for displacement maps now that equate to like a 100,000x100,000 image for displacement maps, because the accuracy requirements for close up renders are so bloody high. That can be many many gigs of data there.
And, if you're raytracing like in Shrek 2, then you need to have as much of that data in RAM at once, or else render time spirals out of sensibility, unlike scanline renderman where swapping is easier, because the rays bouncing throughout the scene make scene divisions more difficult (but still possible).
I work with 4 gigs of RAM and we can just barely render 6 million polygons + a few 4k displacement maps all raytraced at once (in windows unfortunately). And, when we render sequences and stuff, we often almost kill our network because distributing all this data to just 20-30 rendernodes is pretty tough (and how would that scale to a big renderfarm with thousands of rendernodes...)
So, yeah, like everyone else is saying, bandwidth limitations and that people running the screen saver probably don't have the hardware and OS to really run 4+ gigs of RAM, this Shrek@home idea seems rather unlikely. It would be cool though, if it worked...
Hooray for my totally unoriginal post!
I could be wrong, since this information comes from auto companies, but supposedly cars are the most recycled products out there. Most of the metals and perhaps even plastics and glass are usually recycled from totalled cars and stuff, again, supposedly. Seems reasonable to me...
Renderman has been shown working on OSX since last summer.
At the last siggraph I talked to some pixar render techs at their booth, where they were rendering frames of Finding Nemo right in front of us on a G5.
While the G5 was faster than current Pentiums, the Pixars guys said that the price performance champ was still a 2.8 xeon, and I doubt at market prices that's changed. They did have a lot more work to do on it then, and probably still now. I seem to remember them saying they were waiting for better support of more than 3 gigs of RAM at once in Panther...
Anyway, what's really interesting about this move by Pixar will be to see if MTOR and Slim and all those tools come out for Mac soon. In otherwords, Renderman that's actually useful for those of us without our own custom pipeline already in place...
It'll be fun to see how many polygons I can fit into a raytrace accelleration tree on our G5 at work with 4 gigs of RAM.
I'll see how it compares to me rendering 6 million polygons with a few hundred megs of textures in Vray on a PC with *barf* windows (maximum process memory usage 2.3 gigs on a two thread setup before it crashes).
Fiberglass is not so great. The Corvette is, and always has been at least partially made from fiberglass, allowing a rigid body and reasonable weight despite a 5.7L iron block engine (I am not 100% sure of the iron part, just to be fair). It REALLY sucks in crashes though, I think I heard about there being NHSTA investigations. Someone told me that Hummers have fiberglass in their chassis also.
Carbon Fiber is great, but like someone said, it's lack of deformability makes it difficult to engineer for collision protection. It's current price is about $12 a pound, though there are companies (BMW for instance) looking into getting costs down for mass production. The price for steel is like $.50 a pound or something like that, I forget exactly.
Carbon Fiber is GREAT for the roll cage, suspension parts, and lots of other little things like driveshafts.
Aluminum is sorta the wave of the near future. It has pretty decent crumple characteristics and is light and reasonably strong and low on corrosion. "Space Age" Bond and rivet technology specifically is the wave of the future for aluminum bodies. This can be found in the new Jaguar XJ (bigger than it's predicessor, but 440 pounds lighter, and stiffer ans safer), Most new Aston Martins (Brits again), and the Lotus Elise (Brits yet again, and this will be available in america in 2004!). Aluminum is also good for most car parts from engines to suspension, as long as it doesn't need to be super strong like transmission parts and some stuff like that. The Ford 427 (7.0L swept displacement) concept engine is all aluminum and weighs less than a Ford 5.4L V8 that has far less horsepower (590 vs. about 400 {in the mustang cobra R)
Another good thing about Bond and Rivet is that it will trasition well to carbon fiber and other materials when they become affordable.
Steel sucks, and automakers are looking to get rid of as much of it as they can. Though I must say, Volvo's use of Boron Steel for the XC90 roll cage is a good move.
Nothing will ever make a car last forever though. I think it'll be good for cars in the future to be more modular, so that you can ad new technology instead of buying a whole new car, without having to endure an expensive costumization progress. It's be nice to the left over parts to be recyclable, and to a large extent, they already are, as someone pointed out, cars are the most recycles products out there.
Hydrogen combustion engines seem like a great idea too. Hydrogen can combust a much leaner mixture than gas, making the engine more flexible (for instance, in a hybrid, a hydrogen engine might not have to be shut down and restarted since it can idle at an extremely lean rate). And you can just use the same fuel in a fuel cell and power all the accessories electrically instead of having a big heavy complicated accessory drive train, saving weight (maybe) and increasing engine smoothness.
Other than being too boxy and having a silly interior I like this concept. I wonder if it actually works.