Simmed out the default explosion and then converted to vdb, bcf2vdb was painfully slow and made huge vdb files. Reactions is a dream 401,312 Kb rea file converts to a 85,819 kb vdb and does the whole 240 frames in lighting time… 5 mins.
And Arnold render times with vdb on the CPU is just amazing…try it…no need to use the GPU !!. If I am not dreaming then this is superb as my 6 core I7 is just eating it’s way through a render sequence.
Of course RS is faster but I find Arnold easier to setup and easier to get the shading I want. And an I7 6 core is hardly an impressive rig !!
Edit…I was of course getting carried away with the speed up with Arnold, which is there but with a decent graphics card setup RS would be impossible to beat I an sure. As is my 1070 + Titan are blowing my Arnold I7 renders away comparing RS to Arnold. But time is…relative and with a render farm it is quality and ease of setup that counts.
Nice to you see you move from Standard render to better places. Arnold is the best renderer for explosion volume render on the market. Specially with multiscatter, where redshift accepts Arnold’s victory.
Though RS is a wonderful render going by the bench marks if I installed a 3090RT I would only get 2- 3 times the speed up of my 1070 + Titan (12GB) at a cost of…£2000.
For £1000 I can buy a refurbished dual Xeon 20 core ( 2 x 10) with 64 GB RAM and a 8 GB GPU…that would speed up my renders by more than 3 x easily and give me the joy of not bailing out on RAM…siming up to 24 GB of RAM though is more than I would need however for Pro shots I am not sure. I just like the idea of CPU’s and more RAM than I can cope with and with several rigs I can work on several projects at the same time. I have a dual Xeon board waiting to build ( 2 x 8 cores) and need power supply/case/card/SSD/HDD…I am however a single parent who barely can pay my bills so cannot justify any expenditure and rely on my tutorial sales for any CGI expenses ( licensees etc). I am planing a new tutorial so hopefully will be able to raise some funds but it is slow work on my 6 core. I would love to go with Arnold AND RS…but…money…money …money !!! ATM Arnold can render Turbulence on the GPU. and can render reactions VDB’s but it is hit and miss. I am sure they will get the GPU render working beyond basically beta soon. My dream is to become a Pro CGI artist and trainer - Troubleshooter etc. So…any jobs need work on …send them my way !!!