Mike's Stuff

Happy Australia Day.. Sleep in and BBQ all my plans today. This pic was almost all done in Blender.. Getting better at final composition using compositor and color grading. Glows and glares and color curves all used. I did tweak some aspects in Photoshop and also added the lens flare and sun shine. This can be done in blender but i haven't got it right yet. This started with me extracting Chloe's house assets while watching some tv.. lol I noticed the swing was not in the combine mesh object i extracted.. its was a separate individual object, added it in and decided to add young max and chloe playing on it. Would be a nice scene showing the house and them playing. I then noticed the BBQ grill.. and thought to add Joyce and William and changed it to a BBQ scene. Added fire and smoke effect on the BBQ. The settings for these are not very friendly, tweaked until i got something okish. Noticed the ground was a bit boring with the odd blade of grass sticking out... so

The experimental build of Blender now supports combined CPU and GPU render! This is so cool... Its enabled in User Prefs -System.  Just click the CPU and GPU boxes and save. Just stared using it and have noticed that you will need to reduce the tile size to accommodate the slower CPU cores, otherwise what happens is the CPU gets stuck on rendering tiles and the GPU's are waiting idle. So i have tried some different tile sizes and got these results on the BMW test from the Blender site. CPU is a i7 4790 GPU 980GTX + 970GTX First how my two gpu's went: GPU's 512 x 256 Tile Size - 1m23s Now combine the cpu and gpu's and reduce tile size: CPU + GPU's 16x16 Tile size - 1m12s Over 10 sec faster.. Nice performance boost! I found the 16x16 tile size to be fastest. Rest of the results after the break