@eppo, i know the bottlenecks these days between mixed hardware has been reduced significantly (probly so much that its not even noticable anymore) but as a mate once told me about the bottlenecks and to really have a top performance computer you should not mix parts, this is the same man that designed the samsung galaxy S and built the world fastest computer for less than £10,000 (using samsungs money of course) his name is paul curry, and remember that he built this in 2009, and technology still isnt anywhere near as fast as this, check out the video xD
i would try an nvidia card if one was given me (fat chance eh lol) but after just paying about £200 for a top of the line video card i dont fancy forking out another load just to make my blender renderss faster lol, still on the upside with this amazing processor i can now use cycles and its quick (compared to my other computer) your totally right though, the reason i hated cycles is because it doesnt suppose AMD yet :’(
Hello, im calling out for help here to anyone who is willing xD
ive started playing with cycles to see how it does etc, and this is a simple scene i setup to test a few aoptions at once, i like it alot actually (cycles that is) but if anyone knows of any really helpful tutorials that are NOT videos (like blender guru and cgcookie ones) so i can print it off for times when my internet speed is slow i would really appreciate it, i’ll see what i can find on google but im hoping that maybe you guys will know of any particularly good ones
Yeah…I could start about that each of these HD needs to be speaking with mobo… Forget it. Just wait a bit. I think OpenCL will be sorted out soon. I had my windows part loading from 2 physical hd strips, was pretty fast compared to just 1.
For Cycles learning material i would suggest Zotero to Firefox and Great Cycles thread here on forum. A lot of reading of course, but you’ll end up with a load of useful knowledge in reusable database. OL77 used to have pages describing what’s what in cycles nodes.
i guess it doesnt really matter as long as everyone happy with there oiwn computer, and im over the moon about mine so i dont mind waiting for openCL apperently (according to the cycles developer pages) sometime within the next month performance increases and open CL should be coming, so thats given me something to look forward to
thanks for the suggestions, i’ll definately be checking them out
Ah, well… Frankly, i have Pavlov’s dog reflexes while reading about your rig :). Awaiting next renders! With ur pace and such a hard, guess it’ll be soon!
@writersBlock, haha, ive been busy modelling mate just havnt been uploading the WIP as its a secret its actually for blender guru’s latest competition, i thought i might as well join in and learn some new techniques
@Eppo, haha, i have the same problem when i talk about my rig lol for anyone wondering what that means then i’ll save you the confusion and put it simply, dribbling lol (at least i assume thats what you were refering to) well i’ll be continueing with some more of the zonda at some point today so not to worry, renders are on the way
well ive learnt a bit about cycles, made a very nice render (its the name of my girlfriend… im sure she’ll pretend to really interested lol)
which means now its back to the zonda
i thought if im going to get better at cycles why spend time learning that and then time working on my zonda when i can do both at the same time, so heres a basic clay render at 1000 samples done in 9minutes 11 seconds.
Mmm, i shall
It’s not bad actually. But to make it easier on you, just modify your ground plane to be a backdrop (look at the wireframe tut on my site i show how its done…like 5 sec to do it)
You need to fix your lighting however, it is too overblown.
But really, you should focus on modeling rather than rendering. Render in the final stages where you apply the paint shader and look for any defections in your modeling.
@rickyBlender, my Gems? im not sure what you mean mate.
@DDD, haha, YES! a background you like ok i’ll change it to a backdrop at the end and i’ll get the lighting fixed, im finding it weird though using planes as the light source instead of lamps, although it does make a nicer image.
yeah i know, im not focusing on rendering too much just yet, but it makes a nice preview render hehe.
@Marius, haha, yeah i thought it made it look very toy-ish, almost like the car is a radio controlled model or something lol, and yeeeaaahhh ;D
ok i’ll change it to a backdrop at the end 
and i’ll get the lighting fixed, im finding it weird though using planes as the light source instead of lamps, although it does make a nicer image.