Call for review: Blender 2.63 demoloop

by - 2012/05/22 23 Comments Random

Hello everyone!

A few weeks ago I posted about the Blender Demoloop. I gathered all the feedback, polished the files further and worked together with Campbell and Brecht to solve a few issues. A short summary of what we did:

  • Fixed behaviour of demo mode script (initial animation now plays back only once and the file loading starts from the first instead of the second file in the list)
  • Fixed a bug that crashed Blender when rendering with Cycles (interface redraw at file opening was conflicting with rendering)
  • Migrated Arizona render to tile compositor
  • Migrated BMW file to tile compositor
  • Improved Blenderella model display to focus more on details
  • Fixed Frankie animation (there was a bug preventing correct mesh display)
  • Fixed Island rendering (a Cycles fix prevented the image to render correctly since textures were out of scale)
  • Fixed Sintel Bamboo scene (a bug prevented linked libraries from loading)

It’s now time for a second, and possibly final, call for testing! In order to test the demoloop it is necessary to use a very recent release of blender

How to test the loop

You can download this archive (~400MB) and try opening either _start_demo_CPU.blend (cycles render will be done with CPU) or _start_demo_GPU.blend (cycles will use GPU). WARNING: you need a very recent (trunk) version of blender, which you can download here. If you encounter any issues please make sure to mention your blender build, OS and basic hardware config (RAM, GPU, ecc).

  1. boby says:

    Some problème on GPU demo.. It seems to only uses CPU for cycles render.

  2. boby says:

    Edit : sorry forgot basis config :
    OS : Win 7 64b
    Ram 8 Go
    GPU : GTX 560 Ti
    CPU : SB 2600K
    Blender build : 46863

  3. LadeHeria says:

    Same here with an Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit, I7 860 and GTX 560Ti.

    LadeHeria

  4. masoud says:

    very realistic scene!
    I am impatiently waiting for this movie.

  5. e5dy says:

    the demo.py in the _start_demo_GPU.blend haven’t the good links:
    got to change:
    dict(anim_cycles=0, anim_render=False, anim_screen_switch=0, anim_time_max=0.0, anim_time_min=0.0, display_render=5.0, file=’05_helicopter.blend’, mode=’RENDER’),
    to:
    dict(anim_cycles=0, anim_render=False, anim_screen_switch=0, anim_time_max=0.0, anim_time_min=0.0, display_render=5.0, file=’05_helicopter_GPU.blend’, mode=’RENDER’),

    and :
    dict(anim_cycles=0, anim_render=False, anim_screen_switch=0, anim_time_max=8.0, anim_time_min=4.0, display_render=5.0, file=’07_BMW1M_MikePan.blend’, mode=’RENDER’),
    to
    dict(anim_cycles=0, anim_render=False, anim_screen_switch=0, anim_time_max=8.0, anim_time_min=4.0, display_render=5.0, file=’07_BMW1M_MikePan_GPU.blend’, mode=’RENDER’),

  6. Aurel says:

    Everything works out just fine except the rendering as described by the others: It Allways uses The CPU, not the GPU!

    OS : Win 7 64
    Ram: 8 GB
    GPU : GTX 590 POV
    CPU : I7 920 @ 2.66
    Blender build 46903

  7. Malefic Max says:

    Renders only with CPU :(

    OS : Win 7 64
    Ram: 6 GB
    GPU : GTX 560 2Gb
    CPU : C2D [email protected]
    Blender build 46923

  8. Haruku Shikaku says:

    That the robot from Fooly Cooly?

  9. francesco says:

    Thanks for the feedback! Indeed there was a problem in the GPU loop code. Now the download link points to an updated version of the demoloop http://download.blender.org/ftp/incoming/blender_demoloop_v1.1.zip

    Could you try again to run it again on Windows?

  10. Jeroen Mank says:

    My utterly obsolete desktop calculator:
    OS: Windows XP sp3 (32 bit)
    CPU: 2*Intel P4 3.20 GHz
    Ram: 2 GB
    Graphics: NVidea 6200 Turo Cache. No GPU

    Demoloop runs fine on Blender 2.63a stable release. “Bit” slow in the rendering though, but what can I expect from a PC from BC.
    However, the loop crashes when starting 02_arizona.blend on 2.63-r46883-win32, the download from trunk from the link yesterday, 05/22.

    When it comes to the content of the loop: I think there are too many files with similar/overlapping techniques. 5 animation files most of which seem to do almost the same thing (the Sintel file is the exception)? 3 cycles renderings + composites? If the loop is for booths at exhibitions etc. you have to take into concideration that people will be moving around. They’re not going to wait to see yet another animation screen which looks and does almost the same as the previous one, or yet another rendering.
    I think that a demoloop should give a general overview of what blender can do without to much repetition.
    What I missed by the way is a demo of the Video Editor.
    My 2 cents.

  11. Riton says:

    Hi,

    It crashed with my laptop at the beggining of the third cycle render. Seg fault. In the cpu file.

    My config is
    Ubuntu 12.04 64bits
    Intel Centrino (it’s a laptop yeah)
    Ram 4gb

  12. PickleJones says:

    Crashes in both versions on the island scene I guess? Right after Frankie animation I believe.

    IMac: OSX 10.7.4
    Intel Core i5 2.7GHz
    12 GB DDR3
    AMD Radeon HD 6770M

  13. Wolter says:

    Works without a problem for me.
    I ran the CPU version because i have a AMD videocard
    Intel i7 @2.00GHz
    4Gb ram

    The real time BMW and sintel blends are very slow ~2.5fps

  14. Aurel says:

    New GPU demo works great now thanks!

    Short question: Is it normal that i get only about 7 fps on the car glsl? and around 5 on the sintel scene?

  15. ejnersan says:

    Segfaults on island_GPU.blend for me too (CPU + GPU)

    ####
    read blend: /home/san/Documents/blender_demoloop_v1.1/blends/11_island/island_GPU.blend
    func:demo_mode_load_file
    func:DemoMode.execute: 12 files
    func:demo_mode_init
    {‘anim_time_min’: 4.0, ‘display_render’: 5.0, ‘anim_screen_switch’: 0, ‘mode’: ‘RENDER’, ‘file’: ‘/home/san/Documents/blender_demoloop_v1.1/blends/11_island/island_GPU.blend’, ‘anim_cycles’: 0, ‘anim_time_max’: 8.0, ‘anim_render’: False}
    render
    Warning: 1 x Draw Window and Swap: 18.73 ms, average: 18.7252

    Segmentation fault
    ####

    revision 46947
    Intel i7-2600k
    GeForce GTX 560
    Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit

    Hmmm..? just ran the demoloop again before posting, and the Island scene loaded and rendered, and the loop went through the rest and started over. Weird.

    Very nice feature though, with cool demos! Anyway this could be adapted to be a benchmark, saving fps & rendertimes?

    On my machine all realtime demos run @ 24 fps, except the Sintel scene running ~11 fps.

  16. Hi
    I am having trouble rendering the 3 cycles scenes in _start_demo_GPU. They take 00:00:00 seconds to render.

    Blender 2.63-r46960M-OSX-x86_64
    MacBook Pro OSX 10.7.4
    Intel 2.2 Ghz i7
    8Gb Ram
    AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024 MB

    /Mads

  17. Juan Dario Rodas says:

    Hi!

    No trouble at all with my laptop. Both versions ran just fine.

    Blender: 2.63a for Windows 64 bits – r46461:46487M
    Windows 7 Professional 64 bits SP1

    Dell XPS 15 l502x
    Intel Core i7 2630QM @ 2GHz
    8 GB RAM
    NVIDIA Geforce GT 525M

  18. Jorge Molina says:

    Everything went perfect. the BMW real time pan was just a bit slow. but very smooth. I think both the helicopter and the BMW cycles scenes need more rendering time (a little grainy). both CPU and GPU worked perfect.

    (Im not at home now, so I tested in a computer at school)

    tested in:

    Mac OS X vers 10.6.8
    Procesor: 2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
    Memory: 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
    ATI Raedon HD 5870
    type: GPU
    VRAM(total): 1024 MB

    I hope this helps. Im also gonna tested it at my home computer (PC). I’ll let you know the results soon. my computer at home is 32 GB ram, so it better be faster :)

  19. Jorge Molina says:

    ohhh I forgot to mention the Blender version that I used. I used Blender 2.63a r46461 (from Blender.org)

  20. Anuga says:

    All works nicely except for the textures in the cycles renders. They dont show up at all, but if I open the .blend files for the “scenes” (island, bmw) it loads the textures aswell.

    So there seems to be a problem with the path settings.

    I’m using 2.63.7 on OS X 10.7

  21. Stella says:

    Demo Loop is great! However I would like to exclude some blends from loop and to change order. How I can do that?

    Thank you in advance.

    Stella