Hi,
I’ve started a few threads over the past few days and I feel like I should post a better description of who I am and what I’m doing so that I can at least refer to it if people ask me some questions.
My name is Lisa Evans and I’ve been working as an animator at a company called Raging Pixel Productions in Perth, Western Australia for the past couple of years. We mostly use 3DS Max for all our 3D animation work, and I also teach animation students how to use that program from time to time. I have about three years of experience in Max, although I trained in Maya five years ago, and I’ve also used Softimage XSI, Houdini, Cinema4D, Rhino, Animation: Master, Silo, and a bunch of other things. But I started off in Blender in about 1999! That’s how the animation bug bit me.
Earlier this year we were commissioned by Scitech to create graphics for a Planetarium show, using Sky Skan’s full dome video system, called SkyVision. This is one of the latest systems for Planetariums and there are maybe 70 domes in the world with this system, more coming online all the time. It uses 5 digital projectors connected to networked PCs, so it’s a very cheap system to use compared to some of the older film based ones. The show had been created originally in 2000 for an older system based in Melbourne, so what they wanted was for us to use the concepts and soundtrack, and create all new 3D rendered graphics for it.
That show is now screening and over 4000 people have seen it already :). Now we’re raising funds for a second show, which we are going to create completely from scratch. We’re well on our way to raising that budget, which is very exciting!
The main technical hurdle we came up against with the first show was rendering time. The clients provided us with one render farm of 5 nodes, and we hacked together our own farm with between 5 and 8 nodes depending on how many computers we were using for work. We still had to wait a very long time for renders. The final resolution of every frame in one of these shows is 3200x3200. We created these frames by rendering a cubic map from 5 orthogonal cameras, with each face having a resolution of 1600x1600.
So this time around we will be using the services of a super computer facility, which contacted us after hearing about our first show! It’s a linux based system with 160 processors. Needless to say this will make everything a lot easier. However, we needed to find some way of rendering all our content under Linux, without having to pay huge license fees for all the copies of the renderer we would need.
Blender is the obvious solution, and over the past week or more I’ve been re-acquainting myself with it and trying to re-create one of the scenes from our first show. It hasn’t been amazingly easy, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much Blender has progressed since 1999 
Anyway, if anyone has any questions about us and the whole Planetarium show issue, post them here.
