At the moment we’re rendering 24/7 on both of our workstations. The tool of choice of course is Chaotica 2.0 which now supports GPU rendering. We’ve seen tremendous improvement in the speed of rendering. Interestingly performance-wise it seems that both the 1080ti and Radeon VII are on par in terms of rendering speed. Looking at benchmarks comparing the 1080ti vs Radeon VII the 1080ti should be besting the Radeon VI by 4-5% but to us the difference is not noticeable; we’re not looking at video game frame rates, we’re looking at render times of fractals, where each new world and animation adds its own complexity that is not easily repeatable nor measurable (hence chaos it is called).
After we build up big enough library of Chaotica renders we’ll switch to JWildfire, probably starting sometime in Spring of 2021. All frames and animations are rendered in 4k at 3840×2160 which we will later downscale to 1080p and convert to DXV for playback. The 4k renders will be the masters that we can later re-use in productions where 4k resolution is requested or required. Our approach is always to render in 4k, it is so much easier to down-convert later.
One area where we’re lacking a bit is 3D materials. I haven’t touched a 3D rendering tool since Lightwave. So I’ll have to learn something new (like Blender) or we’ll look to collaborate with someone who is well versed in Blender already. It is worth noting that in the 1990s due to hardware limitation (read: render times) our material was always “thin” on 3d renders except for 3d ChaosPro animations and VistaPro fly-bys simply because it took very long to get stuff rendered back then. Lightwave renders were limited to 3D rave logo and DJ names, plus sometimes we’d wrap fractals onto 3d objects and squeeze them in some funky/fun way. We did this because we had time to render in advance of an event (sometimes 2-3 months before an event).