I use Blender to plan my watercooled PC build. It isn't the best option for CAD, but rendering the results with Cycles looks so good!
Posted Apr 3, 2013, 11:27 PM UTC
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Wait, did you model all those elements or did you get them from somewhere? Very impressive either way!
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A good part of the models (especially the case) come from here: http://scc.jezmckean.com/
I had to make lots of adjustments though, and converting them from sketchup was actually quite painful.
All the fittings and watercooling parts are modelled by me. Some of the textures are just photos of the PCBs that can easily be found through Google, the background image is one of the wallpapers that came with Ubuntu 10.04.
EDIT: I should add for anyone interested: The Trick to export a model from Sketchup to Collada and import it into Blender correctly is to explode all groups in Sketchup first. There is a Ruby script called 'Bomb All' that does that. You can also do it manually but some models have hundreds of groups, which would take forever if you did it by hand. Even with the script it might take a long time, and it sometimes crashes Sketchup. But with persistence it can be done.
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Where's the power supply? I see power lines going to the bottom, but is that where the psu is? because that many fans looks like it's where the intercooler/radiator is.
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Yes, the power supply is in the lower part, together with the radiator, the pump and some monitoring and controlling stuff for the cooling system.
Here is a render of the lower part: http://imgur.com/wfRviJS I didn't bother to make that one look beautiful though.
You can see the PSU on the right, the pump is in the middle. There is a black box on the left ceiling that is supposed to be a flowmeter, and below that in the empty space I am planning to put a fancontroller.
To the left of the pump is a valve to switch an external radiator on or off. That makes it possible to move the system without having to carry the external cooling solution around. It should be no problem cooling the system with the internal radiator only, but it should be quieter when cooling with both the internal and external radiators.
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Is this just concept work, or something you actually plan on building?
I ask because the PSU looks small for the output you're looking to do. The case looks too big than anything realistic. The graphics cards have way too much room to sit... And that's all going to be really expensive anyway.
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The case looks too big than anything realistic.
This is a real case :
Silverstone Temjin tJ07
http://i552.photobucket.com/albums/jj334/moshmonkey24/IMG_6004.jpg
The PSU size is a bit short, but I'm assuming it's just a placeholder for whatever 1200+ watt psu he may end up getting.
And it's all to scale so I have no idea what you're trying to say about the cards.
Also:
And that's all going to be really expensive anyway.
Have you looked into pricing a custom rendering workstation with 3 cards? The speed benefits of GPU rendering are pretty well documented.
iirc the demo that Octane did of "real time rendering" was done on a system with a few 680s in it.
Even if he only uses it for gaming, what does it matter how much he spends? It's not your money.
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Just saying from the looks of it. I didn't know it was to scale. The graphics cards don't appear to be to scale.
I like to provide my point of view about it.
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Something about the material on the fans just looks really good to me.
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holy hell. sweet render mate!
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Lovely render!
Can I ask how you set the lighting up in cycles for this or where I can read about it. I am having trouble finding a good tutorial about basic cycles.
Cheers.
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It is very basic really. Just a lamp at the front right, with a warm white that illuminates the inside. And a dimmed lamp at the back.
On both I had to tone the energy way down, the front one is 20.0 and the back one 5.0 if I remember correctly. That is because my scale is so different from the default one, so the default light settings would be way too bright.
The Shaders are mostly just diffuse, glossy for the metal stuff and glass/refraction for the tubing and plexiglass. I had to tweak them, mostly lower the IOR or/and up the noise. But nothing really fancy.
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Very pretty indeed! I'd maybe recommend an antrioscopic (spelling?) shader on the metal that holds the hard drives and so on. Very, very nice, though.
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Thanks! The idea with the anisotropic filter is good, I was already thinking about what to use to make the bright uniformly lit areas less 'noisy', but have not thought about an anisotropic shader. Will try out your suggestion next time I render.
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I'd imagine it's terrible for CAD... like using photoshop to write an email.
Well, it's not that bad actually. It used to be that I had to use Blender Units as Millimeters and scale everything accordingly. But in the latest versions they added support for different unit systems (metric, imperial), and let you specify how much one BU is in real world terms.
Even on this subreddits frontpage there is a link that Blender now supports Computer Aided Machining. So it seems to me that I am not the only one abusing Blender like that.
Besides, I found it hard to find a better open source CAD program, and now I've accustomed myself to Blender so much that it'll be hard to switch.
Fair enough - I have to admit I have no idea what an alternative could be. Bottom line seems to be you're doing a good job of it, so I guess it doesn't really matter how you got it done!
Honestly blender is on par with commercial cad programs, that I've seen. With the exception you don't have good measurements and tools.
Aerospace cad tools have features like material stress, other fluid gas physics, that aren't really for artistic design, more towards structural use of gas and fluids.
CATIA:
http://ostatic.com/files/images/catia_image_1.jpg
http://www.solarisid.com/images/Solaris_Catia_Wir_005.jpg
Basic concept, make a mesh, cut holes, define sizes... cutting and sizing is difficult in blender. (comparatively)
SOLID WORKS:
http://www.javelin-tech.com/main/images/screenshots/simulation_designer3_lg.jpg
http://www.solidsmack.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/sw08-03.jpg
More for structural and material use designing, and running simulations on the materials.
The models you build in catia, can be (somewhat) easily transferred over to solidworks and then materials applied and structurally tested.
The only thing that these really rely heavily on is the maths they can achieve. From simulations to simple maths for cutting and designing, that just aren't 'readily' available in blender. It can be done in blender, but to me it's a bit more artistic, and "meh, that looks good enough" from an artistic point of view. It doesn't have to be a functional device, just look like it's a functional device. Where in Catia, and solidworks, they are designed to make functional devices, and can use physics to make them function as if it were a real object.
You can get some more images from google for searching for the desired program. But I wanted to give the example that they do the same thing, but they are designed for particular uses. Blender is for Art, Catia is for Function, SolidWorks is for materials. They also have add on packages to do particular things, like for aerospace you need to use a virtual wind tunnel to show wing lift, and stresses on the materials during the simulation. Will a wing break off if you hit 500mph wind speeds?
I would kindly disagree: blender cannot work within tolerances, there is no analysis, you can't print semantics, package part lists, calculate volumes, all of which you can do in SW and Catia, as well a solid modelling, rendering and animating. And then there's all the testing, the sustainable materials, and the collaboration aspects of these packages which is part of an engineers workflow.
There's a great workflow where you model using Solidworks and Rhino3D and use blender for the animation and rendering. And there's a plugin coming that does measurements and angles and so hope is not yet lost.
But Blender is, unfortunately, nowhere near Catia /SW. Because if it was I could stop paying a fucking fortune for my SW license. And BRL-CAD is not up to par either.
Looks like it is OK as long as you don't get too complicated. Here is an example that is part of an amazing hack. This girl has some mad skills. Topic may be a little off-colour for some, but it's just shifting the thread from boys' toys to girls' toys :-) http://scanlime.org/2012/11/hacking-my-vagina/