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Hello Everyone,

First of all, a gigantic scale thank you to everyone on here (especially Buddhi, Jesse, Bib the list is quite long) Some of you are kings in my book. It's as if all my life I loved horses but could only look at pictures of them, imagine them. About a year ago when I figured out how to run mandelbulber, it was as if I had as many horses as I could ride, and I wish you could have seen my face the first time I hit 'render' and realized the software worked, I don't think I've ever been so excited, ever. The last year has been fairly obsessive with mandelbulber. Nothing seems to interest me as much as exploring parameters and formulae. So I am very very grateful for all the generous work so many of you have accomplished, it has made a dream come true for me, and many others.

After countless stills I have begun to animate about 3 weeks ago. It's been like a full time job, feels like. Especially for my iMac's i3 chip...

I wanted to ask you all a question about rendering, pertaining to computing power. I've been sacrificing a lot of paramaters to ensure each frame doesn't take a few hours to complete; a frustration, especially with DE level and ambient occlusion (not to mention volumetric lighting and ray-traced reflections). So it is as if my animations are mere sketches that can only allude to the vision. I'm not complaining by any means, yet I feel as though to attain the quality of animations mandelbulber is capable of a vast increase in computing power is needed. Rendering IFS and boxes is usually pretty fast, but my real interests lie in creating imagery that isn't blatantly fractal, but rather based on the forms and extolling their intrinsic beauties in a nuanced way.

Are any of you using anything like Amazon's EC2 for rendering projects? I'm interested in renting a suprecomputer/cloud. Unfortunately my programming knowledge is very limited and setting up an instance and running the platform is (at this point) beyond me.

If anyone has any input or suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated.

Humbly and Thank you,

Cody
 

hello and welcome to the forums.
for mandelbulber i think it's true, animations beyond ifs and boxes doesn't make much sense to render on a single 'puter regardless of the number of cores. For me, that's still enough, but you can also take a look at mandelbulb3d, that has more different formulas and is much better (faster) in creating hybrid fractals. but it's easy to get lost there. the variety of different formulas is so big, that it is a quest of its own to find useful combinations.

i'm not an expert in cloud computing, but i would assume, that setting up a render farm without detailed knoledge - also in adapting sources, does not promise success.

as i see, you are part of this forum for quite a while, so i guess i don't need to recommend a closer look at the different galleries here, to see what's what these days.

have fun! 

A tutorial about how to use Amazon EC2 with Ultrafractal 5 can be found here:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/le36JoO2dgs&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/v/le36JoO2dgs&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

Sam