The Reflections of Style 3 introduction sequence is nearing completion. Clearly, it still needs some work*, but between the RoS3 premiere coming up in a month and me almost finishing this thing, I figured now would be a good time to ask for render help.
If you're interested in helping out, please respond to this thread. I'll contact interested parties when the animation is ready for final render. Of course, render assistance (no matter how small) will be credited.
For the RoS2 call for render assistance, check out the thread http://www.animemusicvideos.org/phpBB/v ... hp?t=55619 .
* Lighting is still a major issue that I'm still working out; the integration of 2D and 3D elements also need improvement. I'd also like to fix the sky, too, but, honestly, that's low on the list.
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TECHNICAL NITTY-GRITTY INSANITY
(skip this if you don't care)
Some things to consider:
(1) I am, when it comes to 3D rendering optimizations, an idiot.
This render uses Blender's progressive radiosity solver to do global illumination work. That's not so bad, but it is terminally stupid when you consider that
(a) the results are noticably different between two different frames unless you instruct the solver to work at ridiculously high resolutions (and guess what I did)
(b) this is an animation
(c) this scene has a ridiculously high number of faces
However, it's too late for me to go about reworking the lighting setup, so I'm sticking with what I've got.
The practical upshot of all this is that the lighting calculations can't be parallelized and take quite a long time (something like 10-12 minutes). The actual rendering is quite fast, though, since I'm just using a scanline renderer.
(2) Related to point (1): Each blade of grass is a 3D object. (I'm faking grass as best I can with texture tricks, but we've got wind simulation in this intro too, and for that, I need 3D grass.) This results in a very large number of vertices (~<strike>4.2 - 4.8</strike> 3.7 million vertices at last count, though I'm working to bring that down), which translates into high memory requirements during rendering (~<strike>800 - 900</strike> 500 - 600 MB). The post-render compositing stage (used for adding fake DoF, color adjustments, etc.) eats up an additional 200 MB. Thankfully, memory usage isn't additive: Blender is smart enough to free memory when it doesn't need it anymore. Still, this scene isn't exactly light.
(3) Render time on my Macbook Pro (Intel Core Duo @ 2.0 GHz with 2GB of RAM) takes 15-18 minutes per frame. My Athlon64 3400+ with 1GB of RAM, in Gentoo, takes about the same amount of time -- maybe a minute or two off here and there.
While still excessive, this is far better than the 1 to 3 hours per frame I pulled with RoS2.
The big difference is that I'm not using a raytracer this time. 
(though I'm kind of making up for that idiocy with radiosity. but enough of that.)(4) Related to points (1) and (2): The version of Blender I am using contains some minor customizations I made to allow me to actually pull this stuff off. The customizations are:
- boosting limits for number of particles and hemicube resolution
- tweaks to the Z combine compositor node
- an additional compositor node very much like the Z combine node, but outputs Z data instead of an image
Therefore, in order to render this, you'll also need a custom copy of Blender. I can provide the source code, Mac OS X binaries, and GNU/Linux binaries, but not Windows binaries (yet). I'm working on the last one, and will hopefully have a solution soon.
