I saw Rampa started his corner, and I thought, "Why not?"  So welcome to Justaviking's Corner.

For any new people, you may call me "Viking" or if you really want to save letters, "JVK" or even just "JV."  Me?  I never conserve on letters.  I type a lot.

I have made of little videos already, which Reallusion was kind enough to post.  One was a tutorial on "Indigo materials" and applying them to scenes in Indigo.  I have learned more since making that, and will add some updates in a "Part 2" I've committed to completing.  The also posted a "Make it Sparkle" video, which is intended to be a "marketing video" showing differences between iClone and Indigo renders.  Lastly, I've also committed to making a "miscellaneous" tutorial about some Indigo stuff I've learned.  Hopefully I'll get them finished in the next week or so.

SOMETHING SPECIAL:

I've been wanting to do a couple things, and finally finished:

• Explore iClone 6's "unlimited lights" capabilities
• Stress test iClone 6

The stress test turned into a major stress on my graphics card.  I found out that a 1GB graphics card really struggles to render a 3GB project.  Duh!  I rendered as slowly as 30 seconds per frame.  So my little project that consisted of 6,000 video frames took about 45 HOURS to render in iClone.  (And I thought Indigo would be slow!)  Really, it's not iClone's fault.  Other projects render just fine.

It's a good demonstration of what happens when your project is THREE TIMES LARGER than what your GPU can hold.

On a positive note, it rendered flawlessly.

As for the lights, I'll go ahead and give you some product statistics:

• 1 huge spot light
• 4 small point lights
• 10 small spot lights
• 9 colored spot lights
  and
• 10 avatars
  and
• A zillion trees (I didn't count them)

Without further ado, here's my little video:

iClone Lights (and Mason)

I just knew that you lot weren't just a hoard of plunderers, but that you could enlighten us with your knowledge and skills. :)

I must repeat this... Other projects rendered fine iClone 6.  This one massively overloaded my graphics card and it's not iClone's fault.

Here are the other two videos I made.

This first one is an Indigo animation.  It's meant to be more "marketing and sales" than technical.

I benefited from symmetry, so I only had to rotate the diamond "one facet" or 1/16th of a rotation.  Then I copied the images in my editor to make it look like it was rotating longer.  (There I go again, giving away all my secrets.  Sort of the inverse of Viking pillaging.)

This next video is actually my first one, and is more of a "tutorial" type of video.

I have learned some other ways of doing things shortly after I made this, and back when I made it there were some features that weren't working yet (but are now).  So what you see were is not the only way to do this, and is not necessarily the best, but it is one of several ways of doing things.

The focus was on Indigo materials, how they differ from iClone materials, and how to apply non-iClone materials to your model when you render it in Indigo.

Life is interesting.

I have been "almost done" with Part 2 of my "Materials" tutorial for two, maybe three weeks now.  It suffered from bloat, and I trimmed it back down to focus on the primary topic and put the "bloat" into it's own tutorial, which is 3/4 done.  I've also been working on another one, the one that will probably be the most interesting, and it also is about 3/4 done.

Just when I thought I'd finally wrap up one or two of these things, we discovered out-of-state friends were going to be passing through, and would stop in for a visit.  Well, pause iClone and queue up the frantic house cleaning!  Then we discover their itinerary changed, and maybe they'll be here next week.

Sigh.

Oh well, the house looks a lot better now (hopefully it survives a week), and I finally got some quality time to finish up one of my tutorials today.

It's uploading right now.  It shouldn't be long and I'll be posting my newest video.

In Part 1, I replaced the semi-diamond material with a real diamond material, but the diamond turned out blue rather than sparkly white.  Why?  That's the topic of Part 2.

This is actually less of a tutorial than it is lecture, or rather, I'd like to think I'm taking you along with me on my journey of discovery.

Hopefully you'll be able to find something useful and interesting in here.

Now that I am starting to collect a couple of videos, I should set up a proper playlist on YouTube.

@everyone - I made a playlist.  I feel so official.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_2ITnz48gdfwZLcOqMOY7WF4BFDZpCr8

I'm going to add an older tutorial on "Smooth Camera Motion" that I've had on Vimeo.  I'm uploading it to YouTube and I'll include it in my Tutorial playlist.  It was made in iClone 5 but applies equally well to iClone 6.

It's still uploading, so I'll add it to the playlist in the morning.

It's sort of funny, isn't it, that I'm spending time on these Indigo tutorials and I didn't even buy a licensed version of Indigo?  (Notice my Indigo shots are always watermarked.)  I was initially thrilled with the idea, but then did the math on the rendering times and realized it wasn't for me.  It's fun to make the stills, but wasn't sometime I wanted to put money into.  However, since I played with it and there's a lot of interest in it, I decided to share what I learned.

I also have a couple other tutorials I've wanted to do for a long time.  One is about UV maps, which applies equally well to both iClone 5 and iClone 6, and the other is a "technique" I wanted to reveal (top secret until I make the tutorial) that applies to all versions of iClone.

My remaining Indigo ones are getting close to being done.  Hopefully it's only a matter of days, not weeks, until they're done.

I used to upload all my videos to Vimeo.  It was great, but on one project I encountered size limitations on the free version, so I finally created a YouTube channel.

YouTube does not allow you to REPLACE A VIDEO like Vimeo does.  The logic, I guess, is you could have a popular video with a lot of views, and replace it with a dumb one, and people would wonder why they got directed to your video, and why it was popular?

I'd be happy, though, to have the option of replacing the video (while keeping the URL link the same) even if it mean wiping out all the statistics.  I don't monetize my videos anyway.

Why does this matter?

I uploaded my "Smooth Camera Motion" tutorial, and picked my full-HD version, even though I knew I had uploaded a different one to Vimeo.

The one I uploaded last night has "pixellation" errors, especially near the end, introduced by my video editor (a test version).  So now my video on YouTube looks really bad when the camera pans.

In Vimeo I'd simply "replace" the video.  It's not changing any substance.  It's like fixing a spelling error in a post.  But in YouTube the new upload is it's own thing, and I'll probably have to delete the other one (or provide a link to the fixed video).

I wish I could simply update the video file, just like I can the description and title..

I re-rendered my old "Smooth camera motion" tutorial in full 1920x1080 resolution without the pixilation I was suffering from before.  (It was a bug in my editing software, not iClone, and has been fixed.)

The "Channel" URL I gave before is the same:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_2ITnz48gdfwZLcOqMOY7WF4BFDZpCr8

For your convenience, here's the clean HD version of the camera tutorial:

.

Why, oh why does it seem like everything has to turn into another oddity and mystery to investigate?

I was finally, seriously working on a long-overdue project.  Then something caught my eye.

Indigo was doing something really strange, and it's a function I've used successfully before.

Do I try to ignore it, or try to figure out why it's behaving strangely now when I know I've gotten it to work fine before?

I have a hard time turning my back on this.  I fear other people will trip over it.  And I'd like to understand it.

But here we go again, another distraction to keep me from ever finishing my real project.

Grrr and sigh.

If anyone is really curious...

In Indigo, when you do a Save As on a scene (using the IGS format), you should get the IGS file and *two* folders; one for the meshes and one for the texture maps (JPG files).

Everything should all be in the same parent folder.

Tonight I wasn't getting the "images" folder (with the texture maps).

In short, the images folder was getting written to the default directory that iClone uses for the Indigo renders.  This was from doing a Save As in Indigo.

The IGS file went to the correct location.  The "mesh" folder went to the correct location.  But not the "images" folder.

Looking inside the IGS file, it actually pointed to the two different locations.  So the IGS file would work... until I wrote a new Indigo scene from iClone, thus overwriting the "images" folder.  At that point, my carefully saved IGS file is broken.

So why did it work before?  And why is it misbehaving tonight?

If I can figure this out, even a little, you can be sure I'll be writing up an ISSUE on this.  But is this purely an Indigo problem (seems likely since I'm doing a Save As inside Indigo, so iClone should have nothing to do with it at that point).

Gahh, why can't I simply ignore stuff like this and do my project?

Double-grrr....

I can't even get it to work correctly at all now.  It worked correctly once, earlier this evening.  Why that one time?

I don't want to reboot my machine, but even killing all my Indigo windows hasn't helped.  For some reason it's determined to write the "images" folder into iClone's default Indigo render temp folder.  Something's really stuck.

I really don't want to reboot my computer (I have a bunch of stuff set up just right, and they don't survive reboots).  But man, this is really annoying me.  It could be a serious problem for some people.  I know what is happening, but not why!!!

It works indeed differently from the Indigo trial version I used before. Perhaps it has to do with the special Indigo RT iClone version.

Anyway, this is not good at all, because it will put huge amounts of textures on your C: drive.

I did another Save As test and checked the IGS file and in that case it shared the Images folder, so it did not make a copy of that.

It may be that images in C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Indigo Renderer\TX_default are perhaps from a scene that was exported directly from iClone without saving it first as scene file. I went to the specific folder and it only had textures for this one scene.

I have used Indigo RT after the official IC6 release and it did create the two directories in the right place initially. And when I did a Save as the Images folder turned out to be shared. I have to go to work now to pay for this expensive hobby but I will check tonight.

So we may be OK and you can go back to your project...:P

I will have to look into it more too.  Well, I don't' *have* to, but I will anyway.  ;)

Your folder path seems a bit different from mine.  Of course we are on different systems, but mine was something like ....iClone/Temp/Indigo/RenderExport... something like that.  It was buried in the iClone "temp" area.

My observation was it always overwrote the "temp" files.  This is when you do a "Render" (not the "Export") from iClone.

So the good news is your C: drive does not fill up with garbage.  I just keeps overwriting it.

I'm starting to think the Save As never wrote the "Image" folder to the correct location, and the successes I saw were when I did the "Export" option.

Oh, FYI, I'm running Indigo RT that I downloaded directly from the Indigo web site, not the what comes through Reallusion.

I wonder if some sort of environment variable is set somewhere, or some goofy Registry setting.

Indigo or iClone?  Whose at fault?  Doing a "Save As" in Indigo shouldn't involve iClone, but it's witting into an iClone folder.  Very curious.

Anyway... I'll play with it a bit more again tonight, and then write up an issue.

Have you checked the settings in the Indigo Options?

Thank you.  I'm glad you liked it.

@Gerry (wires),

Yes I did.  But when I use "Save As" I'm not using either autosave or cache folders.  (I left both options un-checked.)  It should save the entire scene where I tell it to.  The mesh folder works correctly, why not the images folder?

I suppose I could try setting custom folders.  I wonder if the mesh folder will go where I "Save As" to, and the image folder will then end up in my custom auto-save folder.  That would be interesting.  Wrong, but interesting.

I wonder if there's anything about this on the Indigo forums.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

• I'm planning to do an iClone performance benchmark that involves a GPU upgrade to an Nvidia GTX 970.

I thought I would be sharing some fascinating render performance information with you today.  But it hit a snag.

THE PLAN:

• My son is upgrading to a GTX 970 graphics card.
• Take a project that crushed my system
• Run it on his system before he upgrades
• Run in on his system with the new GPU

THE HARDWARE:

My son and I have nearly identical systems.

• CPU
• Both have i7 4770 CPUs.
• Mine is the "unlocked" 4770k" so they're not identical, but very close.
• Motherboard
• Both have ASUS motherboards.
• I have more fan headers and a couple more SATA ports, but in terms of performance they're extremely similar.
• SSD
• Both have 250GB SSDs.
• Not identical, but both are on 6Gbps SATA ports, so they're very similar
• Memory
• I have 16GB, my son only has 8GB.
• Both are "1600" speed.
• Graphics cards
• I have the AMD Radeon HD 6850 (Rating = 2,235)  <-- No CUDA
• He has the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 (Rating = 2,252)  <-- Has CUDA cores !
• Both cards are 1GB memory cards
• HIS NEW CARD WILL BE AN 8GB GTX970 (Rating = 8,625)  <-- CUDA, lots of it
• Overclocking
• None.
• Other than the "automatic" overclock provided by Intel and ASUS, we don't overclock.

The GPU ratings are from the chart PlanetStarDragon likes to use:

• http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
• Both cards are slightly below the 2,665 rating of the "minimum" spec'd card for iClone
• I feel I'm more memory-constrained than limited by actual processing power

THE TEST:

On my iClone 6 lighting "stress test" video (the "UFO" video), I rendered at the super-slow rate of 25-seconds per frame.  Ouch!  It took way over 30 HOURS of non-stop rendering to make my video.

• Stress-test video:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9CJYCWm05s

THE WILDCARD:

If anything made a difference in peformance, it should be the CUDA cores on his Nividia card.

I really wanted to find a good example case where his CUDA cores would run circles around my otherwise-similar non-CUDA AMD card. 

THE SNAG AND RESULTS:

What went wrong?

My son's 8GB of system memory was a surprising limitation.  After running out of RAM on the first attempt, we ended up rebooting to help clear things out.  Even after a reboot I was annoyed at how much RAM his system consumes.  I don't make great efforts to optimize and fine-tune my system, but he has so much crap that runs in the background I couldn't believe it.  So we killed a bunch of things (he was surprised too), launched iClone 6, and opened the project.

His realtime preview ran around 6 FPS.  Mine seemed to run anywhere from 4-6 FPS when I was working on the project, so this provided initial confirmation that our systems really are as similar as I expected them to be.

Then we rendered.

Wow!!! He was rendering at 3 frames per second!!!  That is 75 times faster than my system!!!

But then we hit the snag.

We played the resulting WMV file, and it was 100% black.  No video at all.

So we rendered to AVI.  It was black again.

And that's where my son ran out of patience and wanted to get to work on his computer rebuild.  (He has to get a new case so the GTX 970 would fit, so he has to transplant all the guts to the new case.)

I don't know why it wasn't working.  During the render, nothing moved on the screen.

The system memory was hovering around 6.3GB on his 8GB computer.

I may never know why it wasn't rendering for him.

NEXT STEP:

He doesn't have a lot of hands-on experience with the hardware, and he didn't finish the transplant.  I'm pretty sure I'll be helping him finish it tonight.

Once the dust settles, we'll try the project on his new GTX 970.

At least we'll have a good baseline for the "preview" rendering speed.  And we'll check his rendering speed too.  He also has some Blender baselines prepared, since they interest him more than iClone does.

Hopefully I'll have updates (much shorter) in a couple of days.

Imagine how thrilling and useful it will be when I have results to share!  :P

As my wife learned as a child from her dad, "The hurrier I go, the behinder I get."

PRELIMINARY RESULTS - BLENDER:

First, a recap of his old and new cards:

• OLD... GTX 560, 1GB (Rating = 2,252)
• NEW... GTX 970, 4GB (Rating = 8,625... theoretically 3.8x faster)

SatelliteLevelForTwinStickShooter1

• 560: 09:45.22 | Mem:73.37M, Peak: 75.62M
• 970: 04:31.80 | Mem:69.03M, Peak: 71.28M
• Improvement:  2.17x faster

DesktopGalaxy2
[progressive render - renders whole image sample level by sample level until you tell it to stop OR it reaches the given stopping point]

• 560: 23:25.96 | Mem:72.67M, Peak: 72.67M
• 970: 13:13.76 | Mem:72.88M, Peak: 72.88M
• Improvement:  1.77x faster

ANALYSIS:

First and foremost, you have to be careful about looking at ONE benchmark.  The "ratings" listed a few posts back were the "G3D Mark" score.  It is typical for cards to excel in one synthetic benchmark, struggle in a particular game, and reign supreme in another game's benchmark.

Based on the G3D Mark ratings, we could expect the new card to be 3.8x faster, but we're seeing roughly a 1.8x to 2.2x improvement.

NEXT STEP:

I can't wait for some iClone rendering results.  Not only will it be a faster card overall, but my old card doesn't have CUDA.   (I really wanted to see if his old card with CUDA would noticeably outperform my non-CUDA GPU.  But I don't trust the "all black" rendering results.)

Stay tuned for more results.  :)

The cards:

• Old = GTX 560 - 1GB
• New = GTX 970 - 4GB

The test case:

• My "UFO" lighting and stress-test project:

Interactive preview fps:

• 560 - About 3
• 970 - About 16... 5x faster

Rendering:

• 560 - About 25 seconds per frame (not frames per second)
• 970 - About 3 seconds per frame (still not frames per second)... 8x faster

The project was bumping into [EDIT: "exceeding"] the 4GB RAM limitation on the 970.  No wonder my little 1GB card struggled.

I tried turning off supersampling (render option), and also turned on "Level of Detail."  That helped speed things up, but only for a while.  The GPU memory usage was around 3.85 for a little while, but after several seconds climbed up and hit [EDIT: "exceeded"] the 4GB ceiling again.

It would be interesting to delete a lot of trees and see if that would keep my memory usage down.  I'm pretty sure I have a lot of trees that are not in the cameras field of view (at least during my test segment).

The 16fps felt reasonable for editing purposes.  Not ideal, but I could "scrub" well and I could see what was happening.

The card I bought was initially for a new build (postponed because of time and costs), but is now really helping my older system. I was surprised though when GPU-Z showed a memory usage of about 3.8GB.

I was rendering at 1920x1080. What was your resolution?

Anyway, if the new build ever gets build, I may  be looking for an 8 GB version of the card, which is expected later this year.

I was rendering at 1920x1080 resolution.  I usually use "supersampling = On" and my output format was MP4 video.

I was excited when one of the changes looked like it would keep me below the 4GB level, but it didn't stay that way for very long.

On a related note, there has been some "discovery" that the memory on the 970 is divided amongst two controllers.  Roughly 3.5GB is on a "fast" controller and the remainder is on a "slower" controller.  One has to keep in mind that "slow" memory on a graphics card is still a lot faster than reaching back to the system RAM on the motherboard.  Here are two articles about it:

• http://anandtech.com/show/8931/nvidia-publishes-statement-on-geforce-gtx-970-memory-allocation
• http://anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation

It's difficult to find games where hitting the "slow" memory is actually a problem, because you usually slow down for other reasons first, but this might be a non-gaming situation where it becomes relevant.  Of course, since I actually peaked over 4GB, I hit system RAM anyway, and that would have a much greater impact.

The 970 is still a very nice card, and this new information does not invalidate any of the published benchmarks.

It is very interesting to hear about an 8GB version coming out.  Any idea when???  Does "later" this year, mean June, or November?  Based on this sample project, I'd probably be much better off with an 8GB 970 than a 4GB 980.

There's not doubt that the 4GB 970 is a huge improvement over my current card, but I can already see where "more than 4GB" card would be nice.

The release date looks like a moving target from what I'm reading...:P An indication that a release may be imminent (it was March in January) is that Samsung has cranked up the production of 8Gbit chips.

(:Whistling: Starts reminiscing about the 1kByte RAM on his KIM-1 microprocessor kit...:doze: Oops!) 

So we will see. But in the next two months would be nice. Unfortunately, 99.99% of the discussions I've read are about whether it's useful for gamers (opinions divided), with claims that the memory bus is not wide enough for that amount, etc. They assume that it maybe useful for video editing, but nobody seems to do 3D animation.

And, I would concur that an 8GB GTX 970 is the better choice. My GTX 980 has it easy, even with heavy scenes usage hovers around 50%.

Do you have some GPU-Z data of your experiment? I'm curious to know how much the 970 gets taxed. 

Sorry about that.  I guess it's time to do that again.  I purposely built this scene to stress test iClone and demonstrate "unlimited" lights.  It takes place in the forest in the "Level of Detail" sample project.  The amazing thing is I rendered for over 30 hours without any crash or error on my poor little video card.

My "performance measurements" on the 970 card were taken from around the 2:25 mark on the video below.

My son was running ASUS GPU Tweak.  I didn't grab any screenshots of it, but was surprised to see it go over 4GB.  I'll have to annoy him into re-opening the project and getting some more statistics.  (He also has to shut down some other junk on his computer so he doesn't exceed his 8GB system RAM.  One is some "chat" thing, and he was stunned to see how much memory was freed up when we closed it.  I think he uses close to 5GB while doing nothing much of anything.  Kids these days.)

A quick note on 8GB cards... Putting two 4GB cards in SLI doesn't equate to 8GB, since each card basically has a copy of the same information, more or less.  So two 4GB cards is still 4GB.

I'm still impressed that I rendered for 45 hours without a crash.  I re-rendered one part because I noticed an error.  My real-time preview was so sluggish, I didn't notice one of the glowing orbs went through the UFO, so I re-rendered a portion.  Someone with really sharp eyes can catch a "jump" in the waving tree branches where I spliced the film together.

I've since noticed another minor error.  It's funny how you can literally watch your video 20 times, and still overlook something.  It's not worth fixing, though.  If I could overwrite my uploaded video and use the same URL (like you can in Vimeo) I might consider it, but in YouTube you can't do that, so this will remain as-is.

Hopefully I'll make another project someday.

• Nvidia GTX 980 Ti

• It interested me.
• Because it had a specific pattern, I thought that would be a good challenge since it's very different than making grungy, dirty, blotchy substances like rusty metal.
• Also because of the geometric pattern, normally my first reaction would be to draw it, maybe as an SVG file, and I wanted to see if I could do it without that.

• WAS... 240 GB - OCZ Vertex 3
• NOW... 500 GB - Samsung 850 EVO

• Test                Read       Write
• Sequential =  2.3 %      63.8%
• 512K =            2.8%       55.6%
• 4K =               25.0%        8.5%
• 4K (QD32) =  29.7%     52.4%

I ran across a little tidbit, and this seemed like as good a place to post it as anywhere else...

We often talk about "real reflections" in iClone.  Specifically the lack thereof.
I found it interesting that even Pixar's Renderman makes good use of "shortcuts" for things like reflections.
https://renderman.pixar.com/view/faking-reflections

In this page too, in "The Elements" section (right below the snow picture), they talk about doing reflections for the groundhogs.
https://renderman.pixar.com/view/inside-pixars-shorts

Of course we're talking apples-to-oranges here (not a direct comparison), but I found it interesting anyway.  Even Pixar does not rely on "real" reflections all the time.  But we still need *something* that works better than what we have (don't have) in iClone 6, so I'm letting Reallusion off the hook yet.