That moment: When you see somepony that used to send you asks sending asks to somepony else who RPs the same character as you, and you slowly realize that…
This is so awesome!
I dedicate this pony ask and RP blog to the former owner of its URL. He was a good friend, he helped me start out, and he ran the best Rainbow Dash blog of all time. I can only hope I do it justice.
Fun facts:
- The original blog this URL came from is now Rainbow Scoot’s mod blog. Scoots mod deleted or changed everything except the blog title “Hey There”.
- This blog has already
surpasseddoubled posts and follower over Ask-Princess-Celestia for its first day. ((currently: 10 posts 4 followers vs 5 posts 2 followers)) - I intended to create a Rainbow Dash account before making this account right here.
- The background image was formatted to fit your screen by Rarity Replies mod.
- I don’t RP Dash as a lesbian.
Cheerilee’s Gmod Pony models for Blender baked for 5 hours, 56 minutes, and 15 seconds in Luxrender. The image achieved 2.17 Thousand Samples per Pixel at 1080p (1920x1080).
This was done with Blender and Luxrender like the last two, and with the same hardware configuration, with the exception that I fed Luxrender all 4 of my CPU cores for 4 hours of that render time. This was Bidirectional Path Tracing with Metropolis Light Transport again, with the one change being the tone Mapping kernel was swapped to MaxWhite from Auto Linear in the last image, this made the image less grey.
That said, I learned a couple things from this run through:
First I learned Luxrender 0.08 (the current stable release) does not properly support OpenCL GPU computation, so my graphics card wasn’t receiving its proper share of the work in that last render. As a result of that, I set this run through to be purely CPU based, and fed the extra core to make it faster overall.
Second I learned that rendering in 1080p is something I do NOT want to do on a regular basis. It took FIVE HOURS of baking to create this image.
Third, I have no idea how to properly export textures into Luxrender along with the models from Blender.
Fourth, I learned that Luxrender does not converge an image well with high-poly models. If you don’t understand what that means, look closely for the white dots in this image. They only appear around the models themselves and appear to be artifacts of low sampling rates and non existent caustics that the renderer hasn’t sampled out yet. For this image though, which was merely a proof of concept for the quality of the models themselves, five hours was more than enough. Besides, theoretically, what is left could be simply blurred away by a soft blur. Based on what I’ve seen and heard, 44 thousand samples per pixel would likely eliminate those dots, but it would require me leaving my computer on for 5 days (121.658986 hours) if I can’t get my graphics card working with this.
Overall this was a learning experience, and definitely taught me quite a lot about these tools and this particular rendering algorithm and how they both behave.
I apologize for the camera positioning, I did not start this with the intention of baking it, but ended up doing it anyway for the sake of time on my part. I realized I would need to check the quality of the models at some point, and this camera angle was good enough for Celestia, who was the main focus of this test.
Incidentally, tell me if this works as a decent desktop background.
EDIT: 1080p version here!
