Loramentum - Concept renders for a watercooled, wall mounted PC - Real PC pics pg 3

Hello everybody, feels a little bit odd typing this out as it’s the first piece I’ve submitted to the finished projects section in over 2 years.

This is the concept work for a computer that I’m currently building. The challenge was to make a wall mounted PC that was watercooled, but that could also be packed away and taken to LAN events etc. Obviously it would have been easier to just use a small case and air cool it, but I figured this would be much more exciting.

The renders themselves were made so I could test out different finishes and colour combinations before committing to them. They’ve really helped to refine the look, plus I can now experiment quickly and without cost, which is great.

As for the technical side of things, I rendered the models using Cycles to 1200 samples. Render time at 4K was between 15-54 minutes depending on the complexity of the scene and materials (the packing foam is quite intensive and was responsible for that 54 minute one). Most of the renders finished on the side of 25 minutes or so. I rendered them using 2 Titans and a tile size of 256. The models themselves were made using a combination of Autodesk Inventor and Blender, Blender was used for all of the texturing work too.

(Click for the full 4K resolution.)

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And for the submission picture:

Hope you enjoy!

This is one of the coolest renders I have ever seen. It’s just perfect in every sense. I have no comments, except “perfect” and I have 2 questions for you?

  1. Please talk a little about the creation process for this.

  2. This is more a request. Is there a chance you could post the lighting arrangement you used. I’m studying lighting at this time. Either a .blend (just the lighting setup of course) or a description including world settings would be great. The resolution at this scale is excellent - I’m going to check it out on an HDTV (I always try to look at images on both a monitor and a tv).

…again, absolutely awesome.

Amazing renders, Extra guy. I don’t know what I’m looking at but it’s beautiful xD.
This type of lighting and materials should be taught and studied for product shots, especially that it’s inside blender.
Congratulations!

Impressive work

Thanks for the compliments guys, feels good to be back with a “finished” project once more.

Haha thank you, although I’d hardly call it perfect. There are a few areas here and there that ideally I’d like to touch up, but they’d be quite time consuming and at the end of the day, wouldn’t be very noticeable either.

As for question 1:

The creation process was actually rather simple. I’m an experienced PC builder (hobby rather than profession) and avid watercooler, so I picked out the parts that I felt would be able to convey the look and power I wanted (it’s a decently high spec gaming build really). I then purchased the parts and began taking measurements to produce a rough model for the milled acrylic sections. This I did using Autodesk Inventor. I’d have liked to use Blender for the whole process, but frankly it’s just not very good for this kind of work and lags behind professional CAD packages by quite a large margin. It’s a brilliant artist’s tool, but not a very good engineer’s one.

After building the rough model, I then set about making very accurate models of the parts I had ordered. This was accomplished by just taking lots and lots of measurements with some calipers, again I made much of the models themselves in Inventor, I used Blender to add the details, textures and materials. I then constructed the final model for the machined section based on the exact measurements for those parts. I put the whole lot together within Blender and threw it into my default studio setup scene (which is basically a curved backdrop and a 3 point light setup with a background sunset tone, this is very similar to the one by Jonathan Williamson uses in his Rendering a Sports Car Tutorial). I then added various extra highlights and tweaked the overall lighting settings to get the look I wanted.

  1. Funnily enough the lighting system used in that tutorial is very similar to mine, so you’ll probably learn a lot more through that as he goes through and explains everything really well. Unlike him though I use a lighter backdrop and background, plus I didn’t like it with the main light box either so don’t have that. I did actually upload a .blend a while back elsewhere, but apparently people had some issues loading it properly (the layer system didn’t appear to work properly when they tried it, just gave lots of black spaces).

As I mentioned above in response to blendghost, the lighting method is actually very well documented, so that’s quite handy for teaching purposes. Materials are harder as they’re very much an experience thing I think. When I first started using Cycles a few years back, it was my first foray into any sort of Node based system. This took a fair bit of getting used to, but eventually I got the hang of making basic metallic materials, stone, ceramic etc. It was only a few months ago when I actively decided to improve on working with materials, rather than using presets and ones provided by others. Funnily enough it was almost a case of unlearning as I realised using physically accurate measurements doesn’t always equate to realism.

Often I ended up moving away from reality (especially for things like glass where a realistic IoR often looked odd) but somehow getting closer in the renders as a result. It’s very often the little things that make a big difference. For instance, rather than using a simple glossy shader with 0.2 roughness, using a glossy shader set to 0.04 mixed with a diffuse shader, then using a noise texture scaled right down as a bump map to get the roughness. This gave the rough metal surfaces a much more realistic sheen. Another example is adding a velvet shader node to the egg foam material to produce the soft highlight around the edges. These materials are still pretty simple though, I’ve got a long way to go yet, some of the things I see people make with that system just cause my jaw to hit the floor.

Here’s the node setup for the packing foam if anybody’s interested. The whole thing is completely procedural, which is nice.


And here’s the one for the carbon vinyl. Sadly this one isn’t completely procedural but it’s simple enough, I’ve added the texture image too that I used to achieve the right look.


Carbon texture

Hope that helps!

This is nice, it really shows the value of spending time tweaking your lighting setup. There are many renders of computers on here, this one looks particularly good because you spent the effort making the lighting enhance the models and materials rather than just make them visible.

@Kemmler:

Thanks! Glad you noticed all the little highlights and whatnot. There are probably an extra 10-15 small highlight lamps dotted around that provide all the little corner highlights and flat surface gradients. I basically followed the techniques I was taught in design engineering for hand drawn diagrams: make all the flat surfaces dynamic as it makes them much easier to notice and follow and highlight corners using both inner light and outer shadow. It’s points like that which really cause me to value drawing by hand, as none of the work is done for you, so you can’t be as easily satisfied.

Love the ram sticks! I’m wondering why the motherboard is so thick?

Motherboard doesn’t look overly thick to me. Love this render… Out of curiousity, what are its specs? :eyebrowlift:

Oh my fault, I meant the thing that its all sitting on. Motherboard looks fine, but I don’t see a graphics card? Unless its integrated graphics.

hmmmm some of the metals dont feel right to me but other than that perfect

i wish hardware did look that perfect

The triple fan seen on the far back / left is a graphics card.

wonderful! love it! :ba:

Pretty sure those are the fans for the water cooling. The GPU’s on the right, by the looks of it. The one with the golden plate. Though for a double slotted GPU, it’s rather thin. Hmm.

I share the same feelings :stuck_out_tongue:

Wow I certainly wasn’t expecting to wake up and find that this piece is now on the banner! I guess that would explain the large number of comments in such a short space of time. To answer a few questions:

@Gwedin:
Thanks! The specs are as follows:
CPU - i7 4770k
Mobo - Asus Z87I-Pro
RAM - 16GB Corsair dominator platinum 1866MHz
GPU - Asus R9 290
SSD - 500GB Samsung 840 Evo
PSU - Corsair RM650

  • a fair bit of watercooling gear.

The reason the GPU itself is so thin is that it’s using a waterblock to cool it rather than a normal air heatsink like the one that comes with the card. Waterblocks are much thinner and can reduce a triple slot card down to single slot whilst providing vastly better cooling capacity.

@Robert Banks:
That section you’re talking about has to be that thick for a reason. It’s a 25mm thick piece of acrylic that’s being milled to contain much of the watercooling routing and the entire reservoir itself. It also acts as the supporting frame for the whole computer, so strength is quite important. As mentioned further down by Gwedin, the graphics card is the part on the right hand side laying flat, it’s connected to the motherboard using a PCI-e ribbon cable (which don’t really affect performance for single card setups).

@LordOdin:

Yeah I see what you mean with the metals, they’re really hard to get just right at different scales. Funnily enough though, when the hardware is brand new, it does actually look that perfect. All the metal surfaces etc. are highly polished or freshly sandblasted, so no scratches or dust. This is probably what’s making the metals seem a little off to you as they’re very smooth.

Interesting timing… noticed this referenced from the gigabyte facebook page yesterday
http://www.overclock.net/t/1424387/gallery-build-log-ultimate-wall-mount-rig-maxxplanck-v2-completed

That was actually one of the inspirations for this design funnily enough. I’m the lead mod over at /r/watercooling and he posted it there too when it was completed. The main differences lie in that his is about 5/6 times larger though, also I wasn’t a huge fan of the tubing, think it looks a little messy. It’s a great concept though, I do like how many elements of his one turned out, it has a great finish to it.

Wow small world :slight_smile:

I think on the whole I like your’s a little better, especially the fact you can put it into a hard case for transportation, which I think is kinda neat… Mind you I’d be tempted to put an lcd in the top of the case and turn it into modern re-imagination of the osborne portable computer and everytime I powered it on I would program the pc speaker to play mission impossible or get it to say via the sound card “would you like to play a game of war?” :stuck_out_tongue:

Very Good, man. Really very good.