Rendering the Cray 2 Supercomputer in Maya 6.5 using an SGI Tezro

Irinikus

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I've made a start on the traces and are replicating them as accurately as possible, without removing chips from the board, as there are via's precent beneath some of the chips! But from a visual perspective it will be a very accurate representation of the actual board.

This is far more time consuming that I would have thought, as it's all being constructed from polygons!!!!



Here are the resources being used for the render: (Remember that this is just one of eight boards that will constitute the module.)



Here's where I am currently: This is a rather good mental exercise!

 
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Irinikus

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Here's my latest progress: (I'm taking this slowly as it is rather time consuming)

It's a straight down view looking directly down the Y-Axis to give you a proper view of the detail of the traces that I'm currently working on. (Just remember that this is completely constructed from polygons!)

 

Irinikus

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I was really hoping to finish the traces on the board today, but this is as much as I could stomach for the day, so I guess it will take at least another sitting!



The Tezro is starting to battle with this single board, so I do hope I'll be able to finish it, before passing it on to Blender on the Mac!!!

Here's the rendering info for this scene! It doesn't appear to be very taxing, but I now have to render it from the Maya console, otherwise Maya crashes the system!!!!

 
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Irinikus

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This basically completes the Cray 2 Memory module!!!



I couldn't even export one complete board as a .obj file without Blender crashing, so I had to export a single board in two parts, being the circuit board with traces and the the components separately.

The Power couplings and spacers were also imported separately, once I'd duplicated the complete circuit board with components another seven times!
 
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Irinikus

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I've now made a small start on the structure that's situated within the Cray 2 tank, being the columns of modules, the DC busbars and structures that support the modules (which also serve the function of delivering the Fluorinert coolant to the modules.

What you see here was rendered using the Tezro:

 
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Irinikus

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Here's the latest rendering of the Cray 2' core, rendered in blender on my Mac Pro.



It's bringing the Mac Pro to its knees!!!!

The render memory used peaks at 11.23GB and the machine is on its knees, really raising the question as to the relevance of 64GB of RAM in one of these machines??? I think I'm going to need a more powerful computer, one 3 to 4 times as powerful as this one!!!!

The only way to get around this problem for now, will be to have varying numbers to modules in each stack, to bring the module count down to a level which allows me to build the tank around this structure!

Here's he info on the current ".blend" file for interest sake:

 
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Irinikus

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I've managed to cull a sufficient number of modules present in the model to make it feasible for me to complete the tank! (The culling also makes it look more realistic in my opinion!)

 
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Irinikus

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The way in which I get the scaling correct is through a self-reinforcing cyclic error correction method.

Now that I'm starting to work on the centre of the machine I've had to rebuild it to get the proportions correct!

So here it is: (I've also introduced a Silicon Graphics Infinity Cube into the scene!)

 
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Irinikus

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This is what's sitting in Maya 6.5 on the Tezro:



The complete tank as it stands in the above rendering and a single layer of modules, allowing me to duplicate them in Blender on the Mac, as this simply isn't possible in the Tezro

I will make a video at a later date, showing how these two machines have been teamed up to achieve the final render and how nice their relationship is! (Essentially how you can get more out of you SGI's by teaming them up with more modern systems!)

My Tezro and Mac Pro have always bee setup to function as a single unit and it's a great setup!
 
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Irinikus

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Today I've spent the day messing with the environmental setup here, and this is the latest:





The scene now only has a single overhead spotlight as a light source with the following settings:



These are the global environmental settings:



Take note of the render time for this image with the above settings: 5 min 18 sec and 38 split seconds, using a machine which renders TEST.BLEND in 4 seconds (The Tezro takes 1 min and 6 seconds, therefor the Mac Pro is 16.5 times as powerful as the Tezro is!). This means that this single frame would take +- 1 hour 27 minutes and 27 seconds to render using the Tezro, if that was even possible!









 
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flexion

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how about a rendering of the whole cray cut in half (boolean substraction), so you can see both the outside as well as all the details in the inside
 

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