System upgrades!!!
(Benchmarks from Cinebench R15)
Compiling code or shaders and building lighting always takes up a long time. While for a project like AK, it’s not that bad having to wait a minute or two every couple of minutes when tweaking shaders but having to rebuild the lighting at the production spec is a huge pain. Thanks to some friends in the High Performance Computing space(read: super computers), we’ve managed to acquire a used chip which would nicely upgrade the primary machine we use for development (which is the same one we plan on doing the final output rendering on).
The new chip cuts our wait times down to about 1/3 the time it did on the Intel 5820k we were using before. That means the time we waste waiting for builds has been down down dramatically.
To improve our lighting build times even more, we’ve also managed to get the Unreal Engine 4 Swarm working across a couple of machines. If things work out the way we hope it will, we’ll be able to get the swarm running on the render farm we have here at our office. It’ll be nice to be able to rebuild production spec lighting at preview speeds.
Why is this important? Less down time means more time for us to work on stuff.
