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The title sequences for the cartoon Jeff and Casey Time were all done with Maxwell (by me), and you can watch on-line here.

Since the cartoon is 24fps, the renders make extensive use of Maxwell's motion blur, and it looks fantastic, so good that your eye doesn't really notice it when watching the movie, it just "looks right". But if you pause the titles when the pages of the book are turning, you can see there's a substantial amount of blur on every frame.

1080p versions are coming, but they haven't been posted yet. I'll include a frame here once they have been.

UPDATE: The 1080p versions are up, and I have posted two rendered frames here. Unfortunately, Maxwell doesn't seem to be able to clear up the motion blur noise at SL15, which is all we can really afford to render to time-wise. But, when played back, it still looks good, it's mostly only when you stare at a single frame that you can see the noisiness.

Cheers,
- Casey

Very nice Casey, well executed. Mind sharing your render times per frame? What version are you using.

The main sequence (zoom out on book, opening, zoom in on picture) is ~300 frames. It changes for every chapter of the show, so we re-render the parts with the book title and chapter image, but reuse the unchanged frames.

On deadline, we give each frame a 15 minute cap and a target SL of 7. The frames are all rendered at 1920x1080. They're quite noisy with those settings, but when resized to 800x450, they look great. We then go back and resume the renders up to SL 12 whenever there is spare computing time. We may try to get to SL 15 for the final 1920x1080 "Blu-ray" edition , but we're not sure at this point. We haven't actually released hires videos yet, so I'll have more info once we do.

As for frame times, we render on a single machine right now. It's a dual-proc i7 machine. For the heavily motion-blurred frames, it usually eats up the full 15 minutes to hit SL 7. For the more straightforward frames where little blur is present, it can often hit SL 7 in less than 10.

- Casey

Very nice! It could be better with more samples of course.

With 2.6's motion blur... you may find it performs faster.

tom wrote:Very nice! It could be better with more samples of course.

We're running the renders to SL12 or higher for the eventual hi-res release, so hopefully things will look very snappy (eventually).

- Casey

Bubbaloo wrote:With 2.6's motion blur... you may find it performs faster.

I have not noticed a performance/quality improvement with 2.6 on this scene, but I haven't tested it scientifically.

- Casey

I've updated the original post with two 1080p shots, now that they're available.

- Casey

Rendering aside...That was some funny s*#t!