Remember the TRAXX 160 locomotive i have been working on? I still am! Progress is slow, which is unfortunate since the animation im planning on wont be as good as i hoped it would. Mainly due to time and render constraints. Oh well, here's the current front end of the locomotive, the self-illuminating lights are temporary, im working on making them a bit more fancy with a map from the diffusing shade, and a volumetric light will be placed in front of it with a shadow map so it nicely projects itself on the environment. To many little details? yes, obsessive? yes..
Test animation, pan around the loc, 250 frames. Took about 4 Hours to render with 250 rays, 1.5 hours with 25 rays.
update:
youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmK0j4ikCPw
I never knew it took so long to animate. You have to render frame by frame?
The PS3 is a fantastic machine for rendering, the Xbox is also used a lot for these tasks.
Im working on setting up my own render farm with a few old machine to spread to workload from my laptop and main rig. Right how its rendering a test pan around with 250 frames, lens effects and volumetric light effects. It has been rendering for over a hour now and still has about 30 minutes to go.
Render programs are getting smarter and smarter, there managing the load from serval objects themselves, lights and reflections that do not change do not need to be calculated again. Although this is still far from ideal. I reckon the total animation im working on will take somewhere between 36 and 48 hours to render, depending on the amount of machines used and the raytracing options.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmK0j4ikCPw
http://images.google.nl/images?hl=nl&q=SBB%20cargo&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
The lights have a very faint lens glow effect, i think it came out nicely.
update:
http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/3087/anothertraxxrender4.jpg