Update 7/29/2019: Omar's new scene is ready to render and already underway on SheepIt. If you're part of the CG Cookie Render Monsters team, we'd appreciate you launching the SheepIt app on your computer to contribute. NOTE: Make sure on your SheepIt account "Options" you enable Render my team's projects first. Thanks!
Update 7/18/2019: Omar is polishing new scenes.
Update 7/3/2019: Omar has 2 new files ready for rendering. Let's do dis.
Update 7/1/2019: We have finished rendering two of Omar's reel projects. Way to go community. Omar still has several to prep for rendering. I'm going to unpin this thread and re-pin once it's ready to render again.
Update 6/17/2019: Omar has updated his shared project folder with new scenes to render. It was accidentally uploaded as a new folder so if you've already synced the previous folder, you can delete that one (if it's still there) and you'll have to sync this new one. From now on we know how to avoid this so no more re-syncing.
The time to render is now!
Update 6/16/2019: We've finished Omar's first 2 scenes! Way to go People 👏👏 Thanks to everyone for contributing. Now we're waiting for Omar to setup and upload his next scene.
@theluthier Kent after comparing the original Cycles renders and Element 3D real time ones, I think you are right, rendering it out of Cycles is totally worth going the extra mile for. Although you and Lampel said it was great, that it's 95% there, for a second I saw a twinkle in your eyes saying "C'mon dude, you know it, I know it... there is no spoon." And then the twinkle continued "No one eats an Oreo and doesn't go all the way to the stuffing in the middle, the cookie part is just enough". I see what you mean twinkle.
I didn't want to bother people though, but I guess if I'm going to try this there's no way around that. I don't know how to use Drop Box, I've never used it before. Should I get an account? I hope it's enough space. I remember you kinda set things up in a similar way in the Rendering & Finishing A Blender Animation course. I should re-watch that. I have never done things through the internet so this should be a learning experience.
I, Kent Trammell, am commandeering Omar's original post! [evil laugh] I'm the one that encouraged Omar to reach out to the community for helping him render his demo reel. My computer just sits collecting dust most nights and I'm happy to lend some rendering power to this project while I'm asleep. I suspect that there are a number of CGC community members willing to do the same 🙏
If you want to help out, please follow the instructions below!
The status of the project will be stated and updated at the end of the thread title in brackets. When it says "READY TO RENDER" that means a project has been submitted to SheepIt for rendering. If it says anything else, the project isn't ready for rendering yet.
The status of the project will be stated and updated at the end of the thread title in brackets. When it says "READY TO RENDER" that means it's ready to sync the project folder and start rendering. If it says anything else, the project isn't ready for rendering yet.
STEP 1 -- Sync Omar's project folder to your Google Drive.
If you have a gmail account, you have 15 GB of free Google Drive space. Just click the link and when you're redirected to the Google Drive website, right click on the "Demo Reel Files" folder and choose Add to My Drive.
If you're on Mac or Windows, use the official Google Drive app (personal version) to sync your Google Drive to your computer's file system.
Render_Scenes_1_Packed.blend
If you're on Linux like me, there is no official app. I've had some success with Open Drive but it seems to have stopped syncing on my system. I'm currently using Insync and it's working beautifully. It's $30 after the 15 day trial period, which I will likely pay.
STEP 2 -- Open one of the render-ready .blends with Blender 2.8
After the project folder has finished syncing *entirely* to your computer, launch Blender 2.8 and open Demo Reel Files > Blend Packed Files > Render_2.8-Scene_1_Packed.blend. Then follow Omar's instructions in the file for CPU or GPU rendering, whichever your machine is best equipped.
Enable viewport rendering to double check the scenes look fine (no pink from missing textures). I've tested these files myself and they should be ready to render without problems.
STEP 3 -- Render the Animation
The files should all be setup properly so anyone that opens them doesn't have to do anything but click the Render button.
That should be all you need to do to contribute rendering to Omar's project! Note that these scenes are heavy and can take an hour or more per frame, even on a high end machine, which is why Omar needs our help.
When the rendering is all done (or you need to stop and regain your own GoogleDrive space), simply navigate to the Google Drive website, right click on the folder and choose "Remove".
spikeyxxx Yes, that's the nature of syncing and it's particularly good for rendering. The reason being that Blender looks in that folder for frames that are already rendered so it can skip them and start working on un-rendered frames.
You could work around this. You could tell lsync (or officialgoogle drive app on mac/windows) to not sync the frame files themselves via the selective sync preferences. NOTE you'd have to uncheck each rendered file (so 395 checks based on the count as of the time I'm typing) but leave the folder still syncing.
This means the files stay in the cloud but aren't duplicated to your local hard drive. IF you go that route, you would need to open the .blend file and change the start frame to align with the frames already rendered to the cloud (which you can check via the google drive website). Then your renders would still go to the cloud but you would have skipped waiting for 395 existing frames to be duplicated to your local drive.
I recommend the first way, just letting everything sync and then start rendering. But the second option is doable.
I see other people coming in to render! 
thecabbagedetective Thanks Ay-Ay Ron for contributing. And there's also Sheila Francl, who I don't know, but thanks so much. I hope it doesn't feel invasive to be chekicng that stuff out 🙈
spikeyxxx Also if you decide to move the timeline on the blend file forward to match where its currently rendering, remember not to ever hit SAVE in the .blend or that change will propagate to everyone.
spikeyxxx dostovel To clarify, "Open Drive" is the free app that didn't sync reliably and "Insync" is the paid app (free 15 day trial) that works great so far.
Looks like the folder is at 9.5 GB. If I did my math right, the completed sequence should be around 13 GB. That's good so we don't have to halt rendering and transfer frames in the mid-way through.
@theluthier Well, that's a relief! I will be out of the country for a few days, so I can render about 90 hours at a row. My pc is old and I can't render on GPU, but still, everything counts...I hope I will get this to work, I haven't seen Omar's instructions yet...
Only 66 items left to sync now.
I updated the test frames video on the render output folder. Frames from 1 to 396 are a-ok 👍🏼
I hope that with editing and music it feels more lively that how it looks now.
dostovel I think it looks very lively; high energy. Looking super sharp dude 🤘
If I did my math right, the completed sequence should total about 13 GB. That's good so we don't have to transfer frames mid-way through.
@theluthier Thanks for the encouraging words, Kent.
You weren't kidding when you said it's going to be Gigabits and gigabits of files. I haven't make the calculations... lets see, This is just Project 1 Scene 1. There are 6 Projects each with 2 .blend scenes, that's 12 scenes.
Each scene has roughly 300 frames, so 300 x 12= 3,600 frames
If 550 frames will be 13GB, then 3,600 frames is at least 85GB of disk space.
As long as I did the math right, that is a lot of disk space in image files. And now that I think about it, how is it that I know people that have iPhone's with 120GB of disk capacity and it's all full of pictures? I've always had 16GB iPhone's and I've never ran out of disk space. Am I the freak here?
dostovel 85GB total doesn't surprise me. I think my Piero project directory was 250GB, but that also included video recordings. Imagine how much rendered frame file space was used on a transformers movie 😳
@theluthier Jeez 250GB. I have never filled my 1Terabite disk ever. Is the top of your desk full of hard drives? How do you deal with needing so many gigabytes and gigabytes of space? Don't tell me it's all on the cloud? that would give me major OCD, knowing my stuff it's out there somewhere and not in my control.
And I hadn't even thought of what a movie had to be when it comes to files sizes. I'm having a Pale Blue Dot moment.
Joining the party !
Mandatory propaganda for you who hesitate:
[EDIT] dostovel
Quick question: do we also have to sync ALL the frames ? That takes forever. Is there a way to replace them by empty placeholders when they are on the cloud ?
tbrbn Thanks Thibaut. We should put that in the header.
@theluthier I've notice the syncing of Google Drive have its glitches. Files keep getting duplicated. I'm not going to delete them again because they just spawn again, it's better to let it all finish. My theory is that Google Drive fails to sync the files in people's computer, then Blender doesn't see said file on the Drive folder and renders it and duplicates it when it uploads it.
tbrbn That's a good question Thibaut. If you want to leave your computer alone and just hit render, then at the moment you have to sync all the files, so Blender knows which files are already there and doesn't duplicate them.
That could be a great feature though, having some kind of empty place holder so that syncing doesn't take forever.
I think you can do this.... say in the Google Drive folder it's already on frame 250, so you have to sync 250 EXR's and in order to not wait that long, you can go into Google Drive settings, turned off sync automatically. That way probably it wont download all the 250 EXR but the ones you put in the Drive folder manually will upload to everyone else.
Problem is now your Blender wont know how many EXR files there are in the folder and it can render files that are already rendered because it doesn't see them in the Drive folder because it is not synced.
So in the .blend you can set the time line to start in say frame 300 and hit render animation because you know there are only 250 EXR in the Drive folder. So now you haven't sync 250 files but you'll start dumping from 300 onward. And when we that have all the files sync reach frame 300 and say you have render 20 frames by then, then our Blender will see frames from 300 to 320 are already there and it will jump to 321. Only keep in mind not to save the file or the change will propagate to everyone else.
Hope that makes sense.
@theluthier Kent I am having major issues with motion blur compositing artifacts in this scene. I have to tone it way down and even then it gets wonky. Plus at 0.01 for the artifacts to go away, the motion blur on the wheel isn't even visible anymore. The other scene where the car is stationary is fine, motion blur compositing works great there, the problem is when the car is going at high speed. I might have to run on true motion blur. The scenes are ready, I can upload them to Drive all set up if you want to take a look.
@theluthier Kent, I copied all 554 EXR files to my local drive and made some backups, I will proceed with deleting all those files from the Google Drive folder to release all that GB of space so the rendering of Scene 2 can start. Then I'll delete the Scene_1 .blend so there's no confusion and only leave Scene_2 .blend file. Instead of all the EXR files, I'll put the video test of all the frames in that folder, as if you mixed the EXR's with water, stir it for an hour, 30 minutes in the oven and the video was ready.
Maybe extremely fast objects is a problem for vector-pass motion blur. I've never done anything fast like a moving car now that I think about it. Yeah go ahead and setup for true motion blur and hopefully the render time isn't astronomical.
WOOHOO SCENE 1 FINISHED!! I just started rendering scene 2 💪
@theluthier Awesome. I'll be working on the other scenes that have to be completed, or people will render this so fast they'll catch up to me.
