A few tests

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

The first is a path and a nurbs curve animation. Cool possibilities with this!

The second is a simulation using the molecular addon. I didn't get the "sticky" part right with the sand (I wanted it to clump more), but will do for now.

Eeeeh! After looking them over from the links... sorry about the poor quality. That's what I get for trying to save on bandwidth!

that's neat.

I had seen the "vine growing" type thing before, but have never tried it... but the sand was new to me.

Is that particles, or is it a separate something or other?

Gah! That's going to be a pain to sweep up.

Nifty tests, XRay. If you get the time, I'd like to see your studio setup--I remember the thread on BNewbies where you were building it, but I don't think we've ever seen the final setup! Plus, now that you've had a couple of seasons to settle in we can see how clean or messy you keep your studio. :p

I know these are really simple setups, but it was fun to do.

The sand on the steps was just an attempt to use the "molecular" addon in conjunction with particles. It adds a type of adhesion to the particles that give it a more realistic feel. I didn't really get it right, but went ahead with what I had.

The vines were from the realization that I could animate them. There are tons of tutorials on it, now that I've looked, but I really didn't know it when I was fooling around with it... just thought it was neat. I'm in the process of trying to create a basic scene for my next charcoal drawing. I've got a photograph, but there's just not enough detail in it for me. That leaves me with recreating in 3D and then output to charcoal! These vines will become a nice tree when I get the hang of the workflow.

I'll get on the pics for the studio... I've just made an HDR panorama of part of the backyard that has the studio in it. I'll upload that when I can. First I have to clean this place up!

Wow, the sand scene is pretty cool. It'd be neat if you managed to get the right settings and then put the simulation into an hourglass.

I did think about that one, and it'd still be fun... I just figured the sand wouldn't be too wet in there.... although I didn't get the settings right for that anyway!

Oh, btw, that was 128k particles which isn't much by todays standards, but it slowed me down a bit!

So I decided late yesterday to start an hourglass sim. To start it off I was filling the glass with 500k particles. So later today (a full 24 hrs later) I decided to abort. I need my computer for other stuff this week and it was looking like it could take another 48 hrs to finish the 250 frames. I'll have another go at it another time. I'm sure there are things that can be done to make it work faster. Does anyone know if there is a way to off load a sim to the GPU?

FWIW, here's a few stats. It seems that SLI actually inhibits render times. I thought I would test it out and indeed this is the case. Pretty close to 6 seconds worth per image. Doesn't sound like much until you start adding up those frames!

Without SLI

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

With

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

As requested!  Still in a bit of chaos, but it's working.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Very nice renders! I love how much detail....  Nevertheless, this is entirely cool and everything looks really well done. You did this without professional work, correct?
Curious; do the temperatures stay within pretty normal ranges in this?
-------
For a second there, I thought you had a mini greenscreen hanging on your wall there.

The temps do ok, I suppose. I've been heating in the winter with a couple of electric space heaters (too expensive), but am leaning toward a better option, and have my little air conditioner for the summer. I do need to finish insulating the attic though. Once that's done it should hold temperature nicely.

The green on that window was exactly that. Some fabric for green screen is what it was originally used for and now it does a pretty good job of keeping out some of that light heat! There's still much to be done, but at the moment it all serves a purpose.

This is so awesome!

It seems a lot bigger inside than it does outside.

Thanks. Yeah, I really feel terrible that I haven't used it to the degree that I would like to at this point. But, summer is coming to a close and kids will be back in school. It seems like summer really takes it out of the ol' free time!

Wow nice cave mate. I've been doing something similair, but I live on my own so it's the whole flat any way I want it

BlenderGuru found a similair result when he upgraded to two GPUs. Not sure if he found a way round it or if it's down to Blender itself.