Year: 2023

The minutiae:  730 days and here’s what’s sitting in the /blog folder on the DreamHost webserver, every file that makes the blog function plus all the animation and imagery.  Last year the folder was 8GB, this year 21GB. 

There are a total of 903 .gif animations, 36 .mp4 videos and a handful of images:

 

Local working directory.

7325 files which includes Max files, Photoshop files, After Effects files, fonts, scripts, extensions, plugins, reference sources, links, notes, tips, techniques and inspiration:

 

And here’s the network render directory.  710,036 frames across 251GB

The 710,000 frames are not all totally unique, some are re-renders or layers of the same final piece.  99% are 800×450 24bit 300 frame .png sequences.  60GB of this is point cache data, cloth sim data, CAT (Character Animation Toolkit) data and texture files.

Watching all 900 .gif animations currently on the blog would take 2 ½ hours.

Best guesstimate as to the total time the machines have spent rendering since day 1: ~2000 hours or 2 ½ months.  I suppose I could take it further and average a kilowatt hour electricity price to get an idea of how much it cost to render all of this, I am kinda curious.

Man-hours, I have a rough idea but probably really don’t want to know the actual number.  I’d say it’s gotta be somewhere in the 4000-6000 hour range, so something like 4 to 6 months over 2 years.

I can’t remember the actual date, but at some point in past few months I stopped being concerned with file size on the animated .gif’s.  I’ve been trying to keep them under 30 megs, but now I don’t care so by default the color reduction algorithm goes to Adaptive\Diffusion\256 colors in Photoshop>Export>Save For Web.  So far the largest has been 94 megs.

So, where I am going with all this? 

Short-term; getting the machines torn down, cleaned, OS\software upgrades then a couple of network-rendering kinks worked out (all the rendering has been confined to a single machine for several months now).

Long-term; I’ve got to start making some money off these things, so creating some new stock videos to sell on YouWorkForThem (this round also on some of the other stock footage sites) is going to become a bigger concern and effort.  The nature and flower stuff from the second half of this year could sell pretty good, I’m grateful for whomever or whatever nudged me into that direction.  I guess ideally, the more salable stuff I post here could be re-rendered at 4k then put up for sale on a stock footage site.  Then challenge becomes as my 3D scenes become necessarily and inherently more intricate and complex they take longer to build, maintain and render which doesn’t leave a lot of time for the 4k money makers.   Especially rendering them,

Well, that’s year two.

And whether or not they know it, a deep thank you and sense of gratitude to those who continue to support and encourage.