Some standard Lightwave benchmark scenes to show the highly impressive performance of the new Athlon X2 processor, when compared to my old Pentium 4 machine:

Scene	Pentium 4 3.1Ghz	A64 X2 4400+ 2.5Ghz
Rad Reflective Things	50	22.5
Raytrace	95	43.3
Variations	122	56.2
Tracer No-Radiosity	353	151.3
Tracer Radiosity	459	190.9

Time are measures in seconds. The performance for a single processor machine is astonishing!! Far better even than i could have hoped. Each of the two cores in the new processor is faster than my old Pentium 4...!

You can see the full set of my benchmarks here at Chris' Lightwave Benchmark page along with many other peoples machines (including many overclocked ones), my machine is at the top of the list for single processor boxes at present!

After building and testing my new PC components, I decided to give overclocking the system a try. I knew this would be trickier than my previous setup (Pentium 4 2.6Ghz overclocked to 3.1Ghz) as the new processor has 2 cores each with 1MB cache - this makes it more sensitive to speed changes and voltages than my previous chip. I was not expecting such a good overclock as before, but since each of the cores would be overclocked together, whatever Ghz improvement was achieved would effectively be doubled in performance terms. I was hoping to improve the speed for the stock 2.2Ghz to 2.4Ghz, as this would then make the chip equivilent to a 4800+ which means a saving of several hundred pounds compared to actually purchasing one of those!

To overclock the machine, I simple raised the Front-Side-Bus speed from 200Mhz to 220Mhz, with a cpu multipler of 11x, this is an effective CPU speed of 2400Mhz (each core). To do this the VCore (cpu voltage) needed to be raised to 1.45v and the HTT bus multiplier reduced from 5 to 4 to keep the HyperTransport bus speed down to near 1Ghz (anything above this causes system instability). There is a great page explaining these techniques. I used this page at amdzone.com and this page at anandtech.com also as examples of what is possible.

The overclocking went well, i also reduced the memory clocks to CAS2.5 5/2/2 which is pretty damn fast for DDR500 memory. I'll post some Lightwave performance benchmarks shortly!

I've been upgrading my PC to improve Lightwave multi-threading rendering performance. After seeing benchmarks on various hardware forums I decided to change my processor to one of the amazing new Athlon 64 dual-core processors. They have only just come out and are quite expensive, but the performance is frankly stunning. This also meant upgrading my motherboard and CPU cooler as my current setup is Intel based.

So it's quite a large upgrade but my hope was that the performance increase would be well worth it!

So after purchasing a A64 4400+ processor, Abit AV8 motherboard, ThermalRight XP-90C CPU cooler and SilentX 92mm fan over a month or so I started the upgrade. I already had exteemly good Dual-Channel DDR500 memory from my previous machine which is ideal for the new one also. My plan was to overclock the machine also to give even more performance for the money, this is the reason for using the high-end CPU cooler (solid copper, heavy but a great unit).

Much to my suprise, the upgrade went very well! The PC displayed the POST screen on the first try and after performing an in-place installation of Windows XP, (too keep all my original windows settings, but to remove all drivers for the previous motherboard) the system booted into Windows ok. Installing SP2 was a little more annoying, took a couple of attempts before Windows would accept it with the new motherboard chipset drivers, but eventually it worked.

The next step was to make sure the machine was stable in it's default configuration, I ran various burn in tests, using Sandra 2005, CliBench and Prime95 and everything appeared fine. My shiny new Lightwave box was ready for use!

I've recently upgraded my copy of the amazing Worley F-Prime plugin. It really is one of the most stunning examples of a plugin I've ever seen, increadably useful to preview work in real-time as you work on a complex scene. The latest version apparently features increased speed and less grainy lighting with Radiosity.

I created a test scene to test these features out - it's a well known scene (in computer graphics circles anyway) called the Cornell Box. This is a ubiquitous test scene for global illumination. It was introduced at Cornell university in 1984 when they developed the radiosity lighting/rendering algorithm, and it has since become a standard test scene. The original images and information can be found here. My version can be seen here.

The scene is interesting as the only light comes from the large square panel at the top of the enclosed box. You can see how the colour "bleeds" from the coloured sides of the box to the grey roof and floor. Also the reflective objects pick up a lot of colour from the walls.

It was rendered entirely using the F-Prime plugin progressively over a few hours. I noticed the new version of F-Prime was using 2 threads which made it faster on my HyperThreading supported PC.

I've finished the Dark Subway scene! It took a long time to render even on my relatively powerful PC - 10 hours in total at 100% CPU. The final version had to be rendered at a very large pixel resolution as per the competition guidelines - 3636x2400 pixels. I happy with the image, it's not perfect by any means as I could really have done with more spare time to spend on it, but since I have a "real" job there's not much of that about...! The final cut in a more sensible resolution can be seen here. Comments welcome!

So the date is nearly up for the Exposé 3 competition. The Dark Subway scene i've been working on for it is nearly ready. I've not been able to spend as much time as perhaps i'd like on it - too much "real" work to do as usual. I've ticked off a few of my TODOs including adding drains, a poster on the wall, a new ceiling, dented light fittings and added some more junk on the floor. I tried a few different ideas for the end of the subway, including putting a dodgy looking club front down there but i settled on added another wall with more graffiti at the end instead. I've also changed the bin to look less plastic, added more dirt and filth and changed the ceiling to be made from concrete struts rather than the plain black it was before.
The very latest version can be seen here. Any comments welcome!

List of things I think would make the scene better:

. rough up lights fittings (dented textures)
. rough up bin surface a little
. add barbed wire to fence?
. Or replace fence with dodgy club front, neon sign etc.
. add news paper, crumpled photos etc. on floor
. change coke can labels to dirtyed up lager cans labels
. put torn posters on the walls
. water leak running down walls
. add a floor drain or manhole cover
. add drainage pipes - along top, and/or sides, leak icky fluid etc.
. more crap on floor, e.g. Club UK bottle
. improve ceiling texture - or replace completely with concrete slabs/struts?

This really is a cool plugin, Sasquatch "Lite" comes as part of the standard Lightwave install now and is a very impressive plugin for generating all kinds of fur, hair and grass etc. effects. Here's a quick example of the fur plugin in action. OK so the image is a bit wierd, it's a cat scratch post after all (!) but it shows the kind of thing you can do. The red fur on the top/bottom of the post is quite dense looking but you can still see the edges of the wood through it - sasquatch fur has a real density. The rope area also has the plugin applied but with a lighter effect and much more coarse, to give that scratchy frayed look that some rope has.

There's also this simple animation (NOTE: 8MB file) that I created some time ago which shows some more Sasquatch fur in action, it also shows off some of the built in Lightwave Soft Body Dynamics from a tutorial on the Lightwave CD.

One of the reasons I have previously mentioned the Dark Subway scene I'm working on is because I am considering entering into a 3D competiton called Expose 3. The winners entries get printed into a very nice book with the best other examples of 3D art. Hmm I've probably got a long way to long before it's good enough for that - but it's worth a shot!

Found a really cool, free and easy to use plugin that is helping me make the Subway scene look dirty and grubby. It is called the Ambient Occlusion Shader and can be found here. Basically it adds colour or changes diffusion of a surface at the points where it is close to other surfaces. It does this by firing out random rays from the current position and seeing if it hits anything in the way. If it does find other polygons in the way, it applies more of the shader and so on to make it appear dirtier. So the crevices between objects get most effected by it. The results from using the plugin can be seen here. You can see darker areas at the edges between the floor and the walls etc.

Flay.com is a great Lightwave resource - a very good place to read up-to-date Lightwave news and particularly useful when you are looking for a (free!) plugin for something.

This blog will be for recording my thoughts and TODOs etc. when creating 3D images for my site. Currently I am working a new version of the Subway scene, original images can be found here and another one here.

This scene was originally created back in 1998/1999 in Lightwave 5.5. So it's taken a little while to bring it back up to date!

The original scene was rendered on a Pentium III 500Mhz machine - not much rendering power in that thing! I've been able to use more modern tehniques to improve the image with the latest version of Lightwave [8] and my home-built 3.2Ghz PC. I've added things like area lights instead of spotlights and improved several of the textures too. I have a whole load of TODOs and ideas for the scene, which if I get done I'll write about here...